Big props to Tara Palmeri of Tiger Beat On The Potomac for writing as perfect a horror story as ever Rod Serling imagined. I mean, holy mother of god. We are being ruled by, as my pal Quinn Cummings has been saying for months, a giant toddler, and not a particularly well-behaved one, either.

The key to keeping Trump's Twitter habit under control, according to six former campaign officials, is to ensure that his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump's desk. "If candidate Trump was upset about unfair coverage, it was productive to show him that he was getting fair coverage from outlets that were persuadable," said former communications director Sam Nunberg. "The same media that our base digests and prefers is going to be the base for his support. I would assume the president would like see positive and preferential treatment from those outlets and that would help the operation overall."

Little Lord Fauntleroy, with nuclear bombs.

Luckily, there are well-funded fake news sites around when more than one nanny is needed.

Trump is also, however, a near-nonstop consumer of cable news, and his staff's efforts were not always enough to keep Trump from tweeting on topics that were far from his campaign's core message. Throughout the campaign, whatever messaging the candidate's staff had planned was continually accompanied — and often overshadowed — by a string of feuds that played out both on and off Twitter. But his team believed that their strategies would keep Trump from taking to his preferred social media outlet to escalate his personal or political conflicts. For example, when Trump engaged in a Twitter war with the father of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier in Iraq, Khizr Khan, the team set up a meeting with Gold Star Mothers of Florida and made sure to plant the story in conservative media. Breitbart also wrote stories about Khan's relationships with the Democratic Party. "We made sure that conservative media was aware of it, they connected the echo chamber," the former official said.

Of course, sometimes, the locks on the nursery get left open.

They would also go to media amplifiers like Fox News hosts and conservative columnists to encourage them to tweet out the story so that they could print out and show a two-page list of tweets that show that they were steering the message. While Trump still couldn't contain his Twitter-rage with Machado, and ended up tweeting about a mystery sex-tape of the Hillary Clinton surrogate, aides say they dialed back even more posts. "He saw there was activity so he didn't feel like he had to respond," the former campaign official said. "He sends out these tweets when he feels like people aren't responding enough for him."

Sooner or later, I have to believe even Putin is going to wonder what in Hell he's gotten himself into.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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