Laugh along with pals of Don

Last week’s press conference yielded a hefty crop of fresh hilarity.

Even as the US President people babbled this smattering of hardy souls – who would have us take them seriously as commentators, analysts, thinkers – strove to frame his performance as bold, refreshing and funny rather than the long jarring display of abject cretinism everyone else watched.

Leading the way here in Britain, needless to say, was the billionaire’s friend Piers Morgan.

Unable to mount a plausible defence of one thing Trump said or did, the former Mirror editor, sacked in disgrace, instead attacked people who expect dignity, decency and at least a veneer of competence in their leaders, if little else. Morgan, who recently let it be known that Trump calls him ‘Champ’, tweeted: “Trump has no interest in being your idea of ‘presidential’. He won by doing it his unique (!) way.”

Put another way, winning the job is more important than actually being able to do it. Elsewhere US conservative talking head and regular Fox News ‘expert’ Ann Coulter extolled Trump’s wit over his sneering description of the BBC as “another beauty” of fake news to go alongside CNN, who had just posed a question he flatly refused to answer. Had Ann missed his first presidential press conference where he used exactly the same joke in the same circumstances? No, but she couldn’t very well call him a witless stuck record with around four jokes, all of them weak and bullying in tone, could she? And so on, and so forth, deflecting and deceiving, scrabbling to get near power. In any case, a small silver lining for those descending into despair upon sight of the leader that fame-obsessed nation over the pond was always going to inflict on us sooner or later. We might all be bound to go up in the same Hell-fire, but at least you can go laughing, and with your head held high; not jammed up the backside of a lout.