I know it is hard to stop moralizing, especially in this age of social media and 24/7 virtue-trumpeting. But let’s try. Let’s attempt to understand what’s happening in Trump’s unusual, media-addled brain. Once you stop jumping up and down and shouting racism it becomes obvious. Trump isn’t playing 3-d chess. He just wants to keep the ‘the Squad’ – as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, the four Democratic congresswomen Trump was referring to are known – front and center of the news agenda.

Trump can see the big fissures in the Democratic coalition, and he wants to hammer into them. He knows the squad are a headache for Nancy Pelosi. That’s why he added that joke about Pelosi being ‘very happy to quickly work out free travel.’ The more he can keep the likes of Omar and Tlaib in the news, the better, he thinks, never mind if that means endless pundits calling him racist.