WASHINGTON — I admire El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's artistic courage in releasing the Trump Unplugged set on Tuesday, but I don't think it's going to sell as well as his electric oeuvre does.

Holy hell, will they ever get the dosage right on the trank gun?

The president* closed his busy news day with a press availability at the United Nations in New York. He was just as dishonest and calumnizing as he usually is, but he did it with an affect, and in a voice, that made him look as though he were a basset hound on Quaaludes. Almost without looking up, he lugubriously tossed Mike Pence under the bus by telling congressional Democrats (and the press) to "look at Mike Pence's phone calls." Which, I assume, will now happen. He also seemed to say that he was correct in asking the president of Ukraine to engage in international ratfcking because Hillary Clinton didn't campaign enough in Wisconsin.

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Exit stage nutso. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

But, to me, the moment of all moments came when we had what the indefatigable Daniel Dale of CNN calls a "Sir Story," one of those fables in which a man—and it's almost always a "big, tough man"—comes up to him with tears in his eyes and thanks him just for being president*. On Tuesday, we had a Sir Story that featured dozens of world leaders, a true epic.

"So many leaders came up to me today and they said, 'Sir, what you go through, no president has ever gone through. And it's so bad for your country."

Nothing remotely like this, of course, ever happened. Think about that long enough, and it stops being funny.

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