The all too frequent occurrence of Donald Trump frantically pounding out Twitter posts to defend himself against his outrage of the day is becoming absurd. The more he feels pressured by events, and the exposure of new and damaging facts, the more wild-eyed his tirades become as his world collapses around him.
On Monday morning Trump banged out fifteen tweets. The quantity alone is evidence of how obsessed and afraid he is. But the content makes that even more clear. They are mostly filled with lies and desperate distractions aimed at relieving the crushing duress he must be under. He began with a lie so easily disprovable that Fox News did it:
From there Trump moves on to the new, bestselling book by veteran investigative journalist, Bob Woodward: Fear: Trump in the White House. The book is a well documented tour of Trump's dysfunctional White House. It affirms all of the similar reports that have come out over the past year and a half that cast the administration as a pit of animosity, jealousy, and above all, fear and disrespect for the Commander-in-Chief. Trump leads off with a tweet that contradicts itself. He asserts falsely that Woodward's book relies on "disproven unnamed and anonymous sources." And in the very next sentence notes that these real people "have already come forward" to deny the quotes attributed to them.
So Trump alleges that the book is a "joke" and a "scam" and that he's going to "write the real book." Don't hold your breath. This is coming from someone who has never actually written a book himself, and who is best known for his pathological lying. He also alleges that the quotes attributed to him are fake because he doesn't "talk that way." But everyone has heard how he talks going all the way back to his "pussy grabbing" comments during the election.
Trump was especially dishonest in the tweet wherein he presented the question that NBC's Savannah Guthrie asked Woodward as if it were a statement of fact that corroborated him. It wasn't. She was just asking a question the way that real journalists do. In fact, she was rather aggressively taking an adversarial position that favored Trump. But the President's tweet proves that he either couldn't understand that, or just doesn't care about the truth. And he didn't bother to post Woodward's answer to the question, which was "These are political statements to protect their jobs - totally understandable." That's because real journalists know that sources often tell the truth on background, but lie in public.
While Trump whines about what he regards as a "Deep State" coup that is out to get him (even though many of his critics are his own appointees in the administration), the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller rolls on, getting new information and cooperative witnesses every day. It's only a matter of time before all the truth comes out and Trump will have nothing but his glassy-eyed disciples to prop up his failed presidency. And that time cannot come soon enough.