The best way to understand what Donald Trump is thinking and feeling at any given moment is his Twitter feed. And right now, Trump’s Twitter feed absolutely reeks of panic.
In the space of a little over two hours on Wednesday morning — beginning at around 8:15 a.m. — Trump tweeted or retweeted or retweeted himself more than four dozen times, according to a count kept by CNN’s Betsy Klein.
The tweets — often in all caps and with Trump’s signature poor punctuation and spelling — were literally all over the place. The main thrust, if one could be gleaned, was Trump’s insistence that his political opponents repeatedly broke the law in the FBI’s counter-intelligence operation into Russia interference in the 2016 election, and need to be immediately charged and jailed by the Justice Department.
Here’s just one example:
“NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT CAUGHT COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”
Trump also tweeted about the allegedly dismal state of California, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, nonexistent voter fraud, Joe Biden’s supposed lack of intelligence and an unproven claim that Democrats want to shut down churches.
This all comes after Trump abruptly — via Twitter — ended talks on a Covid-19 stimulus bill on Tuesday afternoon only to kind of, sort of restart them hours later, pushing for funding for airlines and small businesses.
It’s erratic behavior, regardless of whether you like Trump. And it even led Pelosi to speculate that the medicines Trump is taking to treat his case of Covid-19 may be affecting him adversely.
“Believe me, there are people who think that steroids have an impact on thinking,” Pelosi told House Democrats on a call organized after Trump’s Tuesday announcement, according to CNN’s Phil Mattingly. “So I just don’t know.”
While anything is possible when it comes to Trump, I tend to think that his utter wildness of late — again, as expressed through his Twitter feed — is indicative of the rising panic he feels as he looks toward the November 3 election.
Consider Trump’s current state: Having spent four days hospitalized due to complications from the coronavirus, he has returned to a White House that is absolutely besieged with the virus. His wife has it. His press secretary has it. His campaign manager has it. His Stephen Miller has it.
Multiple White House aides have been expressing their concern that Trump is likely still shedding virus and endangering an already bad environment.
And with every new poll on the presidential race, things look more dire for the President. A CNN-SSRS poll this week showed Trump down 16 points to Biden nationally. New numbers in Pennsylvania on Tuesday had Biden up 12 on Trump. A new Florida poll on Tuesday showed Trump down 5. And on and on and on.
And then there’s this final indignity: Trump is isolated in the White House through much of October. (He first started showing symptoms of the virus on October 1, according to his doctors.) That means no campaign rallies where Trump can hear the applause and adoration that drives him. He’s reduced to simply holing up in the White House with his phone and his most-loyal companion: Twitter.
All of which brings me back to how to best understand Twitter, vis-à-vis Trump. Twitter is, effectively, Trump’s id. It’s raw, unfiltered Trump. It’s Trump before his press people and his political aides can stop him or water him down.
As such, it’s a window into his psyche unlike anything we have ever had for a sitting president. What Trump tweets, how much he tweets and when he tweets all provide us insight into what he is thinking and feeling at any given moment.
And it does not take a Twitter expert — or psychologist — to understand what Trump is doing here. Backed into a corner of his own making and confronted with the thing he fears most — losing — Trump is lashing out, indiscriminately, as a way to make himself feel better.
Because of Twitter’s instant feedback, Trump is able to hear the (virtual) applause he so craves, and forget for a minute the situation he is in.
But make no mistake about the message this frenzied flurry of social media activity sends: The President is panicked about his political prospects. Period.
As reported by CNN