I did stay up to watch Trump arrive in Atlanta but then fortunately insomnia met the certainty of his giving a speech and I went to sleep. There’s that line in WarGames that goes “the only winning move is not to play”, and surely if anything, the only thing to do with Trump is ignore him.

Except you can’t make others ignore the man and — I’m obviously in a homily mood today — all it takes for Trump to get in next time is for good people to ignore him. Mind you, good people, politics, I can barely think of a couple.

I like to talk to you about writing and there’s no possibility that Trump has written a complete sentence in his life. But just as the most brutish, stupid man can be capable of surgically precise abuse of their partners, so Trump is shaping a narrative over and over.

I fell for it, too, watching live footage of an aircraft subtly bearing the name Trump, land in Atlanta.

He’s like when you have a tooth out and your tongue keeps going to the gap. But where that stops after a time and possibly corsodyl, one reason Trump keeps prevailing is that others join the narrative.

This is making my teeth hurt. Late last week — you know this bit, although it seems lot longer ago than seven days — Donald Trump did that thing of saying that on a certain day he would reveal definite proof of his innocence but then he cancelled the whole thing.

In the days since, the reaction I keep seeing is that it was his lawyers who told him to cancel. That this was actually a sign that he was finally listening to his legal team.

Bullshit.

There was never going to be an announcement, it was always pre-cancelled, and he got three news cycles out of it: the claim, the cancellation, then the analysis of him apparently listening to advice.

But what that inane analysis also did was give just a little substance to the announcement. Seriously. By focusing on this idea of him listening to advice, all of the news media chose to ignore that his proof was going to be nonsense — and that’s enough.

I would have liked BBC News, or CBS, or CNN, or anyone to say: “Tonight’s headlines: more bollocks from Trump. Now the weather. Or even the sport.”

Instead they were looking in the wrong place and by shining such a light on that part, on making such a big deal of lawyers allegedly telling him to cancel, they validated the claim that he had something.

Just enough.

Certainly just enough for his fans to believe a little longer.

It’s easy, distressingly and disturbingly easy, to mock Trump supporters for being fooled by the crook. Yet all of the media that considers itself unbiased, or which has run a thousand news stories about his demonstrable lies, every one I saw was taken in by this particular performance too.

And there I was, unable to sleep, waiting to see a mugshot and only persuaded to turn over — either in bed or the channel — by the thought of having to look at his mug as he basked in attention.