Donald Trump makes remarks at an event to overhaul the nation's organ transplants and kidney dialysis systems at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, on 10 July 2019

Donald Trump hosted a White House Social Media Summit on Thursday, where the controversial guest list included alt-right meme creators and a QAnon conspiracy theorist but no representatives from either Facebook or Twitter , after lavishing praise on himself as “great looking and smart”.

In the run-up to the event, the president retweeted a post by far-right columnist Katie Hopkins in praise of “Right Minded” world leaders like probable future British PM Boris Johnson, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

Mr Trump has meanwhile found himself the victim of online ridicule after saying that the kidney “has a very special place in the heart” after signing an executive order directing his administration to develop policies addressing kidney-related health issues among Americans.

The president capped his day off by backing down from his 2020 Census demands, instead pursuing other avenues for collecting citizenship information after the Supreme Court blocked his census efforts.

The American Community Survey, which polls 3.5 million US households every year, already includes questions about respondents’ citizenship, so it is unclear what Mr Trump has in mind.

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But Mr Trump appeared to preview his remarks at a White House social media summit, where he complained about being told: ”‘Sir, you can’t ask that question ... because the courts said you can’t.’”

Describing the situation as “the craziest thing,” he went on to contend that surveyors can ask residents how many toilets they have and, “What’s their roof made of? The only thing we can’t ask is, ‘Are you a citizen of the United States?’”

“I think we have a solution that will be very good for a lot of people,” he added.

Mr Trump had said last week that he was “very seriously” considering an executive order to try to force the citizenship question’s inclusion, despite the fact that the government has already begun the lengthy and expensive process of printing the census questionnaire without it.