As long as you don’t care too much about facts, you can learn a lot from a Sean Spicer daily briefing.

The White House press secretary has said that whatever your lying eyes told you, President Trump’s swearing-in had “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” He has insisted that the president’s travel ban against majority-Muslim countries, which the president called a “ban,” was not a ban. He has claimed, falsely, that former President Obama tapped a Fox News reporter’s phones.

But Mr. Spicer’s performance — strident, defensive, stressed-out — carries a wealth of information: about Mr. Trump’s image obsession, about what the president expects of his underlings, about the impossibility of contorting one’s self into a human bridge between reality and Mr. Trump’s agitated mindspace.

The real story, every briefing, is what Mr. Spicer can’t say and how he doesn’t say it.

Press secretaries have always jousted and spun for the boss. But Mr. Spicer’s attempts to jam the square pegs of Mr. Trump’s fancies into the round holes of fact — plus his defining mockery by Melissa McCarthy and “Saturday Night Live” — have made for must-watch cringe TV.