There should have been no surprise when, at the end of June, President Trump responded to a comment by TV’s Mika Brzezinski that he was “lying every day and destroying the country” (not to mention that he had “teensy” hands) by accusing her (as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika”) of coming uninvited, together with recently affianced “Psycho Joe” Scarborough, to his Mar-a-Lago golf club while “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” All the same, the delighted media exploded with its customary indignation on behalf of insulted womankind. “The tweets ended five months of relative silence from the president on the volatile subject of gender,” wrote Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman for The New York Times, using a recently fashionable alternative word for “sex.” But of course the “subject” of the tweet in question was neither sex nor “gender,” but Mika Brzezinski.

The tweet, continued the Times reporters, both of whom used to work for Politico and both of whom had turned up in purloined John Podesta and dncemails during last year’s campaign as surreptitiously cooperative with the propaganda efforts of the Clinton campaign, had the effect of “reintroducing a political vulnerability: his history of demeaning women for their age, appearance, and mental capacity”—a history which they were then only too happy to rehearse, just in case readers had forgotten any of the details. So outrageous was the Trump tweet that even Jerry Springer felt he had to get into the act, tweeting in his turn: