“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Donald Trump tweeted at the reasonable hour of 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

Shackles? There were no visible shackles on Donald Trump when he launched his several-news-cycle-long assaults on Judge Curiel in May, the Khizr Khan family in July or Alicia Machado in September. No reasonable person thinks Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised him to make these headline attacks. It’s hard to think of any Republican member of Congress who would. (Well, maybe there’s one or two.)