Donald Trump’s intervention in our general election breaks all conventions. But never mind, it’s of fleeting value as everything he says nowadays sounds two strides the far side of completely bonkers.

His praise for Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and his accompanying contempt for Jeremy Corbyn, should surprise no one. But the manner of his intervention tells us something about the way politics is being devalued.

You don’t have to dig deep on Twitter to find burrows full of Jeremy Corbyn supporters complaining about the right-wing media and the BBC. Yet let’s push that argument aside for now and have another one instead.

Trump made his comments in a call to Farage’s own radio show on LBC. Never mind Laura Kuenssberg being mean about Saint Jeremy; surely Farage having his own Fox News-style phone-in to promote himself and the Brexit Party, while upending our politics, is much more of a media outrage.

Not only has he been given this shoddy broadcasting platform, but he gets his buddy the president to phone in the praise. All many shades of wrong, although there is room for debate about the benefits of Trump bigging you up. While he praised Johnson with one fork of his tongue, Trump also dragged him through a hedge too, criticising his deal with the EU.

As well as blathering on about how great Johnson and Farage would be as a team, Trump said Corbyn would be very bad for Britain. And that from the man who has dragged the US down every available ditch (including one or two that didn’t contain Boris Johnson).

On the day that Corbyn launched his election campaign with a stirring defence of the NHS, Trump insisted the US wasn’t interested in owning parts of our health service.

The Sun says today that this “destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s most powerful attack line”. Well, perhaps – but only if you are prepared to believe a tatty word Trump says, and no one should ever do that.

Another line on Trump’s intervention is that it’s a boost for Corbyn, defining who he is by what he stands against. If Trump’s against you, it can’t all be bad and might well be for the good.

Corbyn’s launch, as viewed through the allegedly hostile lens of the BBC News, looked impressive. The Labour leader lives for this stuff, if not much else, and knows how to woo a friendly crowd – a skill he shares with Johnson, who also tickles the faithful. In anything, an on-form Corbyn is the better speaker, as Johnson soon descends to spouting improvised platitudes and spluttered nonsense.

Most of the front pages today, an old-fashioned metric perhaps but one I still use, concentrate on Trump wanting a Boris and Nigel love-in. Only the i newspaper plays a straight bat on Labour with the splash headline: “Corbyn vows to transform UK by tackling wealthy elite.”

Oddly, the Labour-supporting Mirror eschews proper politics with a bit of nonsense about departing Speaker John Bercow allegedly wanting a million quid to appear on I’m A Celebrity. Not greed, it seems, but deliberately pricing himself out of the show.

As for the NHS, the potency of this as an election issue is shown both by the chanting supporters at Labour’s launch and Boris Johnson spending more time in hospital than a junior doctor (thankfully, a real junior doctor heckled him yesterday during yet another opportunistic hospital visit).

There is something distasteful about the way Johnson uses hospitals and schools for a rolling party-political broadcast. Does there come a point where this shouldn’t be allowed? Especially from the leader of the party that devoted a decade to austerity, and only woke up to the benefits of state munificence when an election loomed on the horizon.

Incidentally, my favourite pun on the Trump intervention in our election comes in the emailed Mirror Politics morning newsletter: “All the president’s phlegm…”

Nice one, lads and lasses of Mirror Politics. But a threesome with Trump, Farage and Johnson? God, no thanks…