That the rich “entrepreneurial”-styled head of an international news company might have still been backing ridiculous clownburger Donald Trump—after transparently corrupt acts and a pandemic response that relied heavily on his clownburger son-in-law poking his nose into things before everyone lost all remaining interest—is not really news. Much of the news you read comes through the filter of right-leaning corporate owners who don’t give a particular damn about anything but themselves and their personal cash flows, whether it be the Post‘s own worker-gouging Bezos or the unmitigated malevolence of the Murdoch clan. It’s baked in.

The weirder part is that Döpfner apparently insisted quite boldly he had never sent such a message, right up until the Post showed him their copy of the email in question, after which he claimed he might have sent such a thing as “an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.”

You know, just to get a rise out of his own executives. As one does, when one wants to be a free-spirited provocateur.

The “I only did that to be an asshole” defense is itself usually a pretty solid one when it comes to any profile of any chief executive who has rapidly risen through the ranks and now stands on the top of the common rabble, and Döpfner might have had a shot at selling the Ironic Asshole Defense had the email not also contained a numbered list of Trump’s supposed best accomplishments, aside from the being…