Would you like to hear about last night's presidential meltdown, or this morning's? Yes, these are the questions we now face in The World's Greatest Democracy. It seems there are some downsides to electing a guy who Tells It Like It Is—at least when it turns out he's ushered in an era of entirely shameless corruption, total incompetence, and relentless lying.

Donald Trump, American president, perhaps knows something the rest of us are about to find out. Maybe it has to do with the further details Special Counsel Robert Mueller is slated to release Friday about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen—who pled guilty to still more charges last week—and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who also pled guilty to some charges of his own, and who's subsequently been found in violation of his plea agreement because he repeatedly lied to investigators. Manafort, who formerly worked on behalf of any dictator or oligarch who would pay the bills, apparently just loves to do crimes.

Manafort arrives at a Virginia federal court in March. Alex Wong Getty Images

Whatever's coming, it may be why President Good Brain was typing up a storm as he perched himself on the royal commode this morning. For added effect, we will present this Message from the President in the stream-of-consciousness format in which it was undoubtedly born:

Robert Mueller and Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey are Best Friends, just one of many Mueller Conflicts of Interest. And bye the way, wasn’t the woman in charge of prosecuting Jerome Corsi (who I do not know) in charge of “legal” at the corrupt Clinton Foundation? A total Witch Hunt.......Will Robert Mueller’s big time conflicts of interest be listed at the top of his Republicans only Report. Will Andrew Weissman’s horrible and vicious prosecutorial past be listed in the Report. He wrongly destroyed people’s lives, took down great companies, only to be.............overturned, 9-0, in the United States Supreme Court. Doing same thing to people now. Will all of the substantial & many contributions made by the 17 Angry Democrats to the Campaign of Crooked Hillary be listed in top of Report. Will the people that worked for the Clinton........Foundation be listed at the top of the Report? Will the scathing document written about Lyin’ James Comey, by the man in charge of the case, Rod Rosenstein (who also signed the FISA Warrant), be a big part of the Report? Isn’t Rod therefore totally conflicted? Will all of.......the lying and leaking by the people doing the Report, & also Bruce Ohr (and his lovely wife Molly), Comey, Brennan, Clapper, & all of the many fired people of the FBI, be listed in the Report? Will the corruption within the DNC & Clinton Campaign be exposed?..And so much more!

Well gee, I'm convinced!

Mark Wilson Getty Images

The rule of thumb, as usual, is to assume Trump is already doing whatever he's accusing others of. Conflicts of interest? It's the de facto business model of his administration. A crooked foundation? Trump's is under investigation, and the treasurer, Allen Weisselberg—also the CFO of the Trump Organization—has been granted immunity by prosecutors. Lyin' James Comey? Last week Trump made 91 false claims in public, an astounding figure that turns out to be just the 11th-worst week of his tenure. On a one-day trip to Mississippi, he made 44 false claims. He is averaging 8.9 false claims per day in 2018. But yeah, I'm sure the rant above is totally accurate.

There's also the essential weirdness at work here. Seemingly every time Trump mentions "Bruce Ohr"—surprisingly often—he mentions his wife, "Molly," with some kind of suggestive superlative. Very Cool, especially considering her actual name is Nellie and their role in the Russia investigation has been relentlessly warped by right-wing conspiracy theorizing. And, according to journalist Marcy Wheeler, the Andrew Weissman section of the rant is referencing his "horrible and vicious" prosecution of...Enron. You know, the company that has since become synonymous in the public consciousness with corporate fraud. Maybe Trump wants to slap his name on that title, too.

Certainly, if his former Secretary of State's word is anything to go on, he hasn't been doing too much reading on what Enron was up to—or anything else! Yay!

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Tillerson on Trump: He “doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things.” pic.twitter.com/HMk4Idudn3 — Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) December 7, 2018

But this was just one of the recent diatribes. To be frank, it is the more thematically cohesive, in that it almost entirely concerns itself with spreading nonsense conspiracies about Robert Mueller's team on the day they're set to release a report. Stick to the Mueller Lynch Mob!

(It's here that we might remember that the former Big Dick Toilet-peddler whom Trump appointed acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker, is still in the job. Whitaker got into this current racket by going on CNN to defend Trump against the Russia probe, which Whitaker is now overseeing. That included promoting an article that referred to Mueller's team of federal investigators as a "lynch mob." Trump has since essentially admitted he installed Whitaker over the probe. It now appears the president will nominate William Barr, who served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush and has quite a record of his own on special prosecutions, to replace Whitaker permanently. Barr will need to be confirmed by the Senate, and in the meantime, Whitaker will continue in an acting capacity.)

The scattergun yelps Trump emitted last night, on the other hand, betrayed an even more palpable desperation, as the American president tried breathlessly to get any folks watching focused on various shiny objects he pulled out of the nether regions.

First, there was The Victor's Lament:

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Does the Fake News Media ever mention the fact that Republicans, with the very important help of my campaign Rallies, WON THE UNITED STATES SENATE, 53 to 47? All I hear is that the Open Border Dems won the House. Senate alone approves judges & others. Big Republican Win! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

It's not really worth engaging here, but the reason Republicans held onto the Senate so handily was that they were working off a very friendly map. Democrats were defending more than twice as many seats, including many in red states that Trump won handily, and would have had to win statewide elections in places like Texas and Tennessee to take the Senate. In the House, on the other hand, Democrats won 53 percent of the national vote to Republicans' 45 percent. They got 8.8 million more votes. And, after a concession yesterday, have now gained 40 seats, the biggest swing since Watergate. The election was a major victory for Democrats, though Trump is right that Republican control of the Senate will allow him to continue pumping the federal judiciary full of extremists.

Wow, was that a waste of time. After a brief aside on China that passed as a reasonably normal presidential communication, it was back to business:

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Jerome Corsi: ”This is not justice, this is not America. This is a political prosecution. The Special Prosecutor (Counsel), to get this plea deal, demanded I lie and violate the law. They’re the criminals.” He is not alone. 17 Angry Dems. People forced to lie. Sad! @Trish_Regan — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

Jerome Corsi, whom you might have noticed Trump claimed not to know in this morning's tweetpocalypse, is a right-wing conspiracy theorist who's gotten himself all tangled up in the Russia probe. Last month, Corsi announced he'd rejected a plea agreement from Mueller's team, saying he was "not going to sign a lie." Time will tell whether that was his way of signaling he's ready for his pardon.

According to Vox, the suspicion is that Corsi "might have had inside information on the hacking and leak of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails. And Corsi may have shared that information longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone." Corsi, who knew about the emails—which we now know were hacked by the Russians and passed to Wikileaks—before they were public, may have been a go-between for Wikileaks and Trumpworld during the campaign. That is, if there was a conspiracy, he might have been an unlikely key player.

That thread continued with the President of the United States forwarding idle speculation from a Fox News anchor:

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Trish_Regan: “Did the FBI follow protocol to obtain the FISA warrant? I don’t think so. The Dossier was opposition research funded by opponents. Don’t use Government resources to take down political foes. Weaponizing Government for gain.” Is this really America? Witch Hunt! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

And then there was this:

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Arizona, together with our Military and Border Patrol, is bracing for a massive surge at a NON-WALLED area. WE WILL NOT LET THEM THROUGH. Big danger. Nancy and Chuck must approve Boarder Security and the Wall! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

Is this a remake of The Caravan (2018)? They're cranking out these reboots like it's Spider-Man. Needless to say, there's no evidence this newest invasion exists. Throw that on the Lie Pile. It's looking like we're adding to the Seven Peaks.

But perhaps all that paled in comparison to the president's piece de resistance, his latest wild-eyed all-caps screamfest that, thanks to surely unrelated events last night, took on a whole new sheen:

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FAKE NEWS - THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

The unrelated event, of course, was the bomb threat called into CNN, the president's most frequently cited and maligned Media Nemesis, "shortly after 10 p.m." It's impossible, at this point, to draw any connection. What's not reasonable is to any longer deny that the president is fostering a climate of vitriol against the press that is increasingly turning dangerous. It was just in October that a Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to CNN and prominent Democrats—which Trump lamented was distracting people from his midterm propaganda campaign about The Caravan. And it was just a few months ago that a mass murderer who had a longtime beef with a Maryland newspaper walked into the newsroom and shot five journalists to death.

As one of their coworkers suggested while remembering one of them on Twitter, there was something about the present moment that drove the shooter to action after five years of simmering resentment:

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6. We don't know what set him off yet. After years of silence. What finally pushed him far enough that he loaded his shotgun, drove the 40 minutes from Laurel, parked his car, walked through the busy lobby, barricaded our back exit, blasted the simple fragile glass door. — Joshua McKerrow (@joshuamckerrow) December 7, 2018

And it was just last month that the president released a grotesque statement waving away the Saudi government's gruesome murder of a dissident, American-resident journalist. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 75 journalists and media workers have been killed worldwide so far in 2018. In 57 of those cases, their work was confirmed as the motivating factor for their murderers.

What is further clear is that none of this fazes the President of the United States in the least. He is now just trying to lie his way to the end of each day, lashing out wildly as the walls close in on him after decades of lawless behavior without a single consequence. If some journalists, or others, have to die to save his skin, so be it. If the country or the world suffer the kind of damage even future generations will struggle to fix, so what? He won't be here. The president's solipsism is engulfing us all now. We may soon learn whether he's willing to throw his own kids under the bus to protect the only true idol, the object of all his worship and affection: Donald J. Trump.

The world's most powerful man cannot call on a single shred of ethics. He struggles to empathize with other human beings. And he is getting more and more desperate. We all ought to fear what he might be capable of.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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