Day 148: Trump’s Weekly Friday Twitter Meltdown
A quartet of morning tweets range from goading to delusional.
Fridays for Donald Trump tend to frenetic affairs. Whether the root cause is despair that another ineffectual week has gone down the tubes or restlessness to get out of Washington and to the cozy confines his private clubs, the end of the week is usually a mixture of entertaining and pathetic.
Yesterday, Trump was blaming Hillary Clinton for Russian connections on his tweet machine, but today’s missives somehow top those on the insanity index.
- The Provocation
Is that a dare? Is he daring investigators and committees to prove collusion with the Russians? Special counsel Robert Mueller just put together his dream team of prosecutors and investigators, while Trump is being represented by someone with little practical experience in relevant fields who is issuing typo-laden press releases. Trump has been rebuked by top legal minds after he reached out to see if they would defend him. Now, he seems to be engaging in his own defense, 140 characters at a time against a very dangerous and skilled team. This is also Trump admitting that he is being personally investigated for a crime.
2. The Classic
We’ve seen variations of this tweet many, many times. The media loves when Trump tweets. He provides content that CNN, Fox News, ABC, MSNBC and everyone else. They can run multiple segments on his tweets alone and fill programming time. His stuff is so unhinged that it leads to its own articles. (Hey, wait, that sounds familiar….) The fact that Trump has decided to randomly capital words is positively Trumpian. If you had to explain to someone a Trump tweet using just one of his, this would be a solid example.
3. The Thanks, Obama
As we’ve mentioned many times previously, Trump and the GOP-led Congress have yet to pass any substantial legislation that could have even plausible led to job creation, infrastructure development, tax reform or anything else that led to economic improvements of any ilk. The economy and jobs numbers are lagging indicators, and we probably won’t have the full Trump effect for another six months or so. The numbers that Trump champions are actually the result of eight years of hard work by Barack Obama and his team.
4. The Insanity
Trump saved the best for last of his morning quartet. Read that thing again. Read it one more time.
Trump appears to be claiming that he’s being investigated for obstruction of justice by Mueller after Mueller told Trump to fire former FBI director James Comey. This is so far beyond the normal realm of rational thought that it defies any reasonable explanation. Trump fired Comey after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote sketchy letters telling Trump that they had concerns about Comey. Trump later admitted that the reason he fired Comey was that Comey wouldn’t drop an investigation into that “Russia thing” and said, “I was going to fire him regardless of the recommendation.”
By media accounts, Mueller was at the White House the day before he was appointed as special counsel, but he was there interviewing for the FBI director job (a job which Mueller held for 12 years under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama). Comey had already been fired when Mueller was at the White House.
Let’s live in Trump’s brain for a minute and say that totally made-up conversation happened in real life. Trump still took that bad advice, but is just blame-shifting. We know Trump was counseled on firing Comey by a number of team members. We know he made the final call. He doesn’t get to pass that buck off on to someone else for the political fall out of a wildly poor decision.
148 days in, 1314 to go
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