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Martin Schram, an opinion columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

In the gilded, overwhelmingly ornate main room of his Mar-a-Lago resort and estate, former President Donald Trump stood in front of four huge American flags Thursday and pinballed through a press conference unlike anything ever seen in presidential campaigning.

Trump performed much like those steel pinballs that bounced and banged off spring-cushioned blobs beneath the glass tops of those flashing, clanging bar game machines that were all the rage in the last century. Trump bounced and banged from one false claim to nasty name calling to fake statistics to feel-good promises and then back to the next false claim.

If you thought each seemed astonishingly unrelated to whatever came before and/or was about to follow, well the problem wasn’t you. America’s 45th president seemed determined to become a one-man public works jobs provider for media fact-checkers.

Actually, there was one organizing theme to Trump’s pressorama: size matters. He returned to the theme he fixated upon on Day One of his presidency, when he ordered his press secretary to tell you Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest ever. On Thursday, Trump kept returning to brag about his crowd sizes.

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