Amid questions over his charitable giving and defunct for-profit school, Donald Trump continues to sling insults at any member of the media who contradicts him. PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS

Even by the exacting standards of the 2016 campaign, which has turned into a theatre of the absurd and the disturbing, the past twenty-four hours have been bizarre. Barely had Americans returned to work from the Memorial Day weekend when word came that Donald Trump would be holding a mid-morning press conference at Trump Tower. He planned to detail how he had distributed some six million dollars that he claimed to have raised for veterans’ organizations back in January, when, fuming at Fox News and its anchor Megyn Kelly, he skipped a Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa, and held a charity event of his own.

Early last week, the Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold reported that he couldn’t find any veterans’ organizations that had received money from Trump’s event. And it was only as Fahrenthold prepared to publish his story, he reported, that Trump moved to fulfill a pledge to donate a million dollars of his own.

To anyone who was familiar with Trump’s record of philanthropy, which is long on rounds of golf donated to charity by his various courses but short on actual cash handed over, the Post story wasn’t entirely surprising. Together with other reports, it clearly got under Trump’s skin, though. As the press conference began, his staff distributed a list of forty veterans’ organization to which he or his charitable foundation had sent checks. The organizations ran the gamut from the Navy SEAL Foundation, to which the Trump Foundation donated four hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars, and Operation Homefront, a sizable Texas-based charity, which received fifty thousand dollars, to much smaller outfits, such as New England Wounded Veterans, which got seventy-five thousand dollars.

The Associated Press subsequently reported that many of the checks went out just last week, and that at least some were dated May 24th, the same day Fahrenthold’s story appeared. Trump, when he took the microphone, didn’t pause to explain this coincidence. Instead, he lashed out at the media for querying his actions.

“You make me look very bad,” Trump complained. “I have never received such bad publicity for doing such a good job.” He called the reporting about his donations “dishonest” and “unfair,” and he singled out some of the journalists present. Pointing at Tom Llamas, of ABC News, Trump said, “You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well.” To CNN’s Jim Acosta, who expressed doubts about whether Trump could withstand media scrutiny, the candidate said, “Excuse me, excuse me. I’ve watched you on television. You’re a real beauty.” At one point in Trump’s rant, a reporter asked him if his angry demeanor was an indication of how his White House news conferences would go, should he get elected. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It is going to be like this.”

Trump didn’t reserve his vitriol for members of the Fourth Estate. He also took some swings at Mitt Romney, the patron saint of the Never Trump movement, and at its de-facto chief executive, Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, who had interrupted his holiday weekend to tweet, “There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”

Asked about the possibility of a third-party candidate, Trump said that it would lose the election for the Republicans, “and therefore you lose the Supreme Court.” He reminded his audience that Kristol once predicted that he wouldn’t run for President, and he added, “He’s got no credibility. . . . He looks like a fool.” Then he hit his antagonist with the ultimate Trump insult: “Bill Kristol’s a loser. His magazine is failing, as you know. I don’t think it even survives. He’s getting some free publicity.”

Kristol, a veteran Republican grandee who came to prominence as Vice-President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, didn’t take long to return fire. “I gather Donald Trump said I’m a loser,” he wrote on Twitter. “I’ve won some and I’ve lost some, but one thing I’ve always tried not to be is a roaring jackass.”

In the Twitterverse—or, at least, in parts of it—this was adjudged a devilishly effective response, the literary equivalent of Ali coming off the ropes to drop Foreman to the canvas. More than sixteen hundred people have retweeted Kristol’s bon mot thus far, and one of the retweeters, Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, proclaimed, “Quote of the 2016 campaign - so far.”

From this pre-noon high, however, Kristol’s day was to embark on a steep descent. In the middle of the afternoon, Bloomberg News’s Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reported that the “impressive” third-party candidate Kristol had in mind to challenge Trump was David French, a conservative lawyer and anti-abortion activist who writes for National Review, the conservative publication that earlier this year published a special issue devoted to the theme “Against Trump.” As word of French’s possible candidacy got around, it provoked a collective raspberry from the commentariat, the likes of which hasn’t been heard since John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Harry Enten, of FiveThirtyEight, wrote on Twitter, “No offense but who the hell is David French?” BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski quipped, “Kristol went with French after his first choice, Harambe the gorilla, became unexpectedly [un]available.” (The reference was to the primate shot by zookeepers at the Cincinnati Zoo, on Saturday.) Josh Barro, of Business Insider, said, “I want to thank Bill Kristol. I have a headache and I’m not feeling so great today, and the hearty laugh he just gave me cheered me up.”

Even some people more familiar with French expressed doubts. Ed Morrissey, a senior editor at the conservative Web site HotAir tweeted, “Huge respect for both @DavidAFrench & @BillKristol, but this is like picking @GeorgeWill to pitch for your fantasy baseball team.”

Some of this reaction may have been unfair to French, a Harvard Law School-trained constitutional lawyer, social conservative, and decorated military veteran. (While serving as Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, he was awarded a Bronze Star.) On Tuesday evening, Mitt Romney came to French’s defense, tweeting, “I know David French to be an honorable, intelligent and patriotic person. I look forward to following what he has to say.”

The fact remains, however, that French is a political neophyte. He doesn’t have any money to finance a campaign, and just last week he published an article saying that Romney was the only one with “the integrity, financial resources, name recognition, and broad public support to make a realistic independent run at the presidency.”

Perhaps the most revelatory reaction to the news about Kristol and French came from Trump himself. Like the dog in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” Trump didn’t bark. Either he didn’t think it was worth his while, or he was too busy tweeting abuse at yet another reporter, Katie Couric, and preparing for a fawning interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, who let slip the non-revelation that he would be voting for his guest in November. “You know, I am not the corrupt press,” Hannity said. “I am actually the conservative.” Trump responded, “You happen to be right about that.”