It’s not easy being President, according to Donald Trump. For one thing, as he told the crowd at a rally in Toledo, Ohio, on Thursday night, you have to sit through television programs that you don’t like—such as the Democratic Presidential debates. “I’m supposed to watch. It’s, like, my job—try and watch, watch the competition. But it’s like watching death. It’s death. Those debates are boring.” The comparison of death to dullness might have been a little off-key for someone who almost triggered a war with Iran last week. But Trump was prepared to be heroic about the arduous viewing service that was asked of him. “You’ve got to sit through those things for two and a half hours—you’ve got to really be committed to the country.”

One of the remarkable aspects of the Toledo rally was how variegated Trump’s anger at what comes out of his television can be, even if his target is, in many ways, an imaginary television. For example, there is a serious debate going on about the legal basis for the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian general whom the United States killed in Iraq earlier this month, and an accompanying push to make sure that any wider war has congressional authorization. (For too many years, the post-9/11 authorizations for the use of military force have been used for too many tenuously related military actions.) But according to Trump, it was the media that made it impossible for him to consult with Congress or, apparently, with anybody sensible.

Imagine, he asked his supporters, if, with Suleimani in its sights, the Administration had called Representative Adam Schiff, of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Schiff is a big leaker,” Trump said. “You know he leaks to Crazy CNN.” (No relation, presumably, to “Crazy Bernie,” an epithet that Trump has also used several times.) Trump continued, “Not too many people are watching CNN. But he leaks! So he’ll say, ‘You know, uh, off the record, I’ve got to hurry up because everyone’s watching me in the hallway with my cell phone’ ”—apparently, Trump is even bothered by background shots in cable-news footage—“ ‘off the record, they’ve got the No. 1 terrorist in the world, Suleimani, and they’re going to get him, they’re going to take him out in the next ten minutes. Please, don’t tell anybody I told you about that!’ ” In Trump’s alternative-reality tale, CNN tells, anyway: “ ‘We have breaking news! President Trump, within the next twenty, twenty-five minutes, looks to be taking out terrorist General Suleimani! He’s going to do it—should be happening about the next twenty minutes, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen.’ ” Then he, Trump, would ask the military, “ ‘How’d you do, fellows?’ ” Only to be told, “ ‘I don’t know, sir, he disappeared!’ ”

This is not how Congress operates; this is not how CNN operates. It has become commonplace for Trump to decry major media outlets as the enemy of the people, though he did say on Thursday night that there is “one good one”—presumably Fox News. What the President proposed in Toledo, though, was that the supposed perfidy of the media was a reasonable excuse for him to ignore his legal and constitutional obligations regarding congressional oversight. Indeed, he suggested that even members of Congress don’t have a good-faith commitment to oversight. Instead, “They want us to tell them so that they could leak it to their friends in the corrupt media.” The crowd booed loudly, and the brief interval was enough for Trump’s mind to make another, rather garbled connection: “You’ve got to say, though, that’s a lot of media, right? That’s the way the Academy Awards used to look when it was successful! Then they started hitting us all the time and it became unsuccessful. I love it. I love it, actually!” (No word on whether he is cheering for “Marriage Story,” “Little Women,” or “The Irishman.”)

And what, Trump went on, is the story with prizes these days, anyhow? This was another complaint about the media—“They get Pulitzer Prizes for being wrong!”—that segued into a complaint about the failure of the world to honor Donald Trump. “I’m going to tell you about the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said, explaining that he’d “saved a country” but that, scandalously, the prize had gone to the leader of that country. (He seemed to be talking about Ethiopia, whose Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, was awarded the prize for attaining peace with Eritrea, which was not a Trump achievement; an Ethiopian official told reporters that Trump was likely referring to his role in a separate dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt, involving a dam.) “But, you know, that’s the way it is,” Trump said.

Adam Schiff appeared to be on Trump’s mind because of the impeachment. Trump said that even if he had called a meeting with members of Congress about the Suleimani operation, Schiff—“Adam, you little pencil-neck!”—would have said, “ ‘I can’t make it now because I’m trying to impeach Trump!’ ” He derided the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, as “Nervous Nancy,” and sounded amazed that anyone would think that he should talk to her. “The radical Democrats have never been more extreme than they are now. They are stone-cold crazy,” Trump said. “They’re vicious, horrible people.” As for the substance of the impeachment charges? “By the way, did you see, I did nothing wrong.” The Democrats were just “wasting America’s time with demented hoaxes and crazy witch hunts.”

And, of course, boring television. Assuming that Trump has been making that sacrifice and watching the Democratic debates, it doesn’t appear that he’s been listening very carefully. He spent a couple of minutes mocking Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso, who left the race months ago. Trump’s griping veered between O’Rourke’s supposedly outrageous concern about the effects of fossil fuels to the attention that he got from the media, which included a profile in Vanity Fair. (“Remember he had the cover of the magazine? I won’t mention the magazine—sleazebag magazine.”) At least print media still catches Trump’s eye, in addition to cable.

The President did bring out his stock insults for the remaining Democratic contenders, whom he called “some real beauties”: “Pocahantas is slipping badly”; “Crazy Bernie, he’s surging”; Buttigieg reminds him of Alfred E. Neuman, and his name is hard to pronounce, “so what they do is they call him Mayor Pete.” Joe Biden “doesn’t know the difference between Iran and Iraq” and his son Hunter started making a lot of money “as soon as Sleepy Joe became Vice-President.” This was a reference to Hunter Biden’s role in the story underlying the impeachment case against Trump, who, among other things, is alleged to have threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its President opened an investigation into the Biden family. The Senate impeachment trial should get under way in short order. No doubt, it will make for some good television—not boring at all. Trump may not like sitting through it. But the programming of the Presidency is not entirely up to him.