Donald Trump looked out across the White House ballroom at his audience of wealthy donors and business figures – people who had given millions of dollars to his extravagant plan to build a vast ballroom attached to the building’s East Wing.

The president, 79, told the crowd he had enjoyed a “really historic trip” to the Middle East, and indulged in some of his familiar patter: saying his tariffs were successful, and claiming that under Joe Biden, countries were “literally emptying out insane asylums into our country”.

As his speech, given last Wednesday, labored on, Trump turned to ballroom specifics.

He said: “So I just wanna say, thank you all. Uh, simply, behind me, so, is a knockout panel. This panel, the next time you come here, will be opened up and gone. No – uh, no problem with any of the surrounding areas. These, this room will be fixed. This will be like a cocktail – the whole floor will be cocktails or pre-briefings or whatever it may be, lots of different things. So the entire floor. So you come in, the entire floor sets up. We didn’t have to do any of that. Usually, you have to do that. You need different rooms to go along with a ballroom.”

I wouldn’t even sit through that long of a quote from a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. In fact, I’d be asking if anyone still smokes so I can bum one while we go out on the porch.