If you'd like 38 minutes of instructional demonstration about your president and the mainstream media--and surely by now you don't--then click on your president's pre-emptively released video of his interview with "60 Minutes" for tonight's segment.
It's all there, as comprehensively and compactly as I've seen.
That Donald Trump released the video ahead of CBS' airing, doing so in violation of the White House's agreement to use its separate recording only for archival purposes, reflects the utter lack of trustworthiness of this president and his ego-driven indifference toward all established norms and courtesies.
The best of numerous examples of Trump's deeply flawed essence comes from his statement that he wants the U.S. Supreme Court to kill the Affordable Care Act, then his saying when asked that he and Republicans will take care of pre-existing conditions after that, and then saying, when asked for particulars of how they'll do that, that the only particular anyone needs is his saying so.
So, once more, because this is important to sick people, and thus to good people: The ACA guarantees explicitly that a chronically diseased person may go onto the Obamacare care exchange and buy insurance just like anybody else, for the same rate and the same assurance of coverages.
That means a person whose cancer is in remission could quit his job providing company health insurance, start his own business and go on the Obamacare exchanges and buy individual coverage at the same breadth and price as any of us. No questions would be asked. It would not matter that there was high statistical threat that he might face recurring cancer and expensive treatment.
Trump says essentially in this interview that no one should worry about losing that explicit guarantee because he is telling you that he is going to come up with something "great."
That's about the biggest word in his policy vocabulary: "great."
He says that, if language goes into law that coverage will be required for pre-existing conditions, then the cancer patient ought to be satisfied with that, no matter whether the words are backed by details--by ways and means--or whether flexibilities and ranges in costs and benefits are left to states and insurers in a way that leaves the cancer patient to a jurisdictional crapshoot.
Who needs details and explicit assurances when you have the great one saying he has a great plan?
A "high-risk" pool seeded by federal money matched by voluntarily participating states to cover catastrophic cases is not anything remotely like the ACA's absolute explicit guarantee of pre-existing condition equality in benefits and premiums.
In the interview, Trump is quintessentially Trump, which is to say petulant, astoundingly dishonest and a millimeter deep. He strings short self-serving words together without connection, fact, truth or context.
He reveals utter disdain for the vital role of a skeptical press in holding him to account. He believes the little lady with the TV station ought simply to sit quietly and let him talk.
That his elementary playground-caliber bickering was with a woman reporter revealed again, that, while he hates all non-adoring media deeply, he reserves special vitriol for a woman reporter who challenges him.
That's so even if she's from Fox.
Megyn Kelly, he said, was "bleeding from wherever" when she revealed such brazen female audacity as to quote to him things he'd said.
This time, Leslie Stahl of "60 Minutes" got walked out on early and stood up for a scheduled second round because she was asking a lot of questions he didn't like and arguing with what he answered.
"That's no way to talk," Trump told Stahl, like Archie Bunker telling Edith to "stifle."
Yet that, alas, was Stahl's failing, one regrettably typical of a Trump-era mainstream media dynamic. The emerging mainstream media rule is that this president is so atrocious that he renders impossible any obligation to detached reporting and necessitates that his interviewers yield to peer pressure and argue with him rather than simply letting him lie.
I found Stahl almost as off-putting as Trump. She had no focus on good, hard, direct, coordinated questions. She allowed her time with Trump to be squandered in incessant interruptions and tiresome disputes that destroyed hope of anything other than his lying as usual and her flailing as reporters are wont to around Trump.
It's time to understand and accept that Trump says nothing that amounts to anything or bears on any truth before or after, and that he speaks only to facilitate his transactional escape from the moment.
Reporters should simply ask him a good and hard question and sit quietly for his transactional blather, then ask a follow-up that reveals or assumes the lie of the original transactional blather, then move to another subject likely to be handled by the same pattern.
It's time to vote on whether we want to endure four more years of that cycle.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.