On Tuesday, January 9, The Washington Post headlined: “The White House struggles to silence talk of Trump’s mental fitness”—which all by itself gives you a pretty good idea of where the Post stands on the subject of the President’s sanity. And on just about everything else to do with him too. The article’s authors, Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, apparently thought so highly of their own subtlety in insinuating that Mr. Trump was crazy that they tried the same trick again on Wednesday as part of what the Post laughably calls “The Debrief: An occasional series offering insights from reporters.” On this occasion, the “insight” consisted of the following: “55 minutes at the table: Trump tries to negotiate and prove stability”—with what success, in their view, we can again infer from the headline alone.

In the background of both articles, of course, there lay the scurrilous book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, whose shocking revelations had burned up the airwaves over the preceding weekend—though by the time of Wednesday’s article, Mr. Rucker and Ms. Parker had not thought it necessary to mention Mr. Wolff’s gossip-mongering. The question of the President’s “stability” was now independent of the sleazy journalist who had raised it and had become merely “the question that has been nagging at him for the past week”—which the fifty-five-minute conference mentioned in the headline had supposedly been designed to answer in a way favorable to himself. Once again, Wednesday’s “tries,”