So the postmortem smear didn’t illuminate Powell. But it did help explain something true about Trump. Without Twitter, without chyron-to-chyron coverage from Fox News and without a pulsing presidential campaign to boost his messages, Trump depends on his shock-jock skills to elbow his way into the public sphere and onto the front page. Wicked mugging like this may look brainy and calculating, but it’s a good bet that, for Trump, swinging wildly when nobody pays attention to him has become his first instinct. Shouting through a megaphone to reach the cheap seats is also a technique he uses in court, too, filing ridiculous lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to overturn election results or to punish his niece Mary Trump. His grandstanding shouldn’t work after all this time, but it still does…

Trump seems to intuitively understand that these cheap shots don’t cost him with his base, which applauds his corrosive moxie. Given his history of explosive comments, he has set a baseline expectation for rude conduct that he must exceed to keep his fans entertained and to keep his critics appalled enough to drive his “statements” into the news. Truth be told, he probably didn’t care much one way or the other about Colin Powell, but, seeing the general’s death forming a news wave, he decided to paddle out and ride it to shore in hopes of getting noticed. But the downside for Trump — if downsides exist in Trumpworld — is that as he descends ever lower to hack his way into the news, he will end up sending the equivalent of an audition tape to the social media outlets that have only suspended him (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitch), that they should never let him return.