While the Republican Party and the free press alike pretend not to notice, Dear Leader's mind continues to unspool in ever more dramatic ways. Donald Trump remains absolutely obsessed with discrediting the Mueller "report," which documented the means by which Russian intelligence services hacked Democratic servers, provided the contents to WikiLeaks, and weaponized social media to spread useful but false conspiracy theories. It also documented the apparent efforts by Trump ally Roger Stone and others in the Trump campaign to benefit from and coordinate with those Russian intelligence efforts and, when U.S. investigators came knocking, obstruct the investigation by lying about their own actions.
Trump, however, appears to genuinely believe a conspiracy theory arguing that the Democrats hacked their own server to make Russia, and Donald Trump, look bad, and that every single bit of crime-doing by those on Donald Trump's campaign and administration is actually a plot by a network of underground enemies to make him look even worse. His response? Sigh.
In a series of, ahem, morning tweets, Trump provided yet another of his now-commonplace public meltdowns, this one again focusing on the upcoming sentencing of Roger Stone for lying to federal investigators. Trump again fumed that "everything having to do with this fraudulent investigation," meaning Mueller's Russia probe, "is badly tainted and, in my opinion, should be thrown out."
He again repeated numerous false claims to support this theory, none of which we need to go into yet again, to declare that "the whole deal was a total SCAM. If I wasn't president, I'd be suing everyone all over the place ..."
"… BUT MAYBE I STILL WILL. WITCH HUNT!"
All right, so it appears the theoretical sitting president of the United States is threatening to sue federal law enforcement officers(?) on behalf of an ally who lied to those investigators on his behalf. It appears. As with all things Trump, there is (1) not enough cognitive detail in there to quite parse out what his supposed plan is, and (2) he's almost certainly lying his pathological ass off anyway.
But this is not normal. We can all agree on at least that, right? These ravings are not something you would ordinary see scrawled on any government stationary—and remember, the White House has insisted that Trump's tweets are "official" administration statements. The man is a ball of seething spite. His every obsession revolves around the notion that his enemies, everywhere, are doing him wrong in a worldwide plan to sabotage his great genius. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of conspirators. Every ally who has been proven to have committed crimes (for example, Paul Manafort's off-the-books deals to sabotage the Ukrainian government on behalf of pro-Russian oligarchs), should not have to answer for those crimes because they are his friends and prosecutors are mean and dishonest and wrong.
This is not normal. This is a human in crisis. This is a mind stripping its gears and billowing smoke. This is a man who went through his whole life as a malignant narcissist with enough inherited money to pave over his every indiscretion, now absolutely baffled to find himself in a position where his bluster and his hired fixers have both failed him, trying to re-parse the world in a way that lets him still claim to be the world's preeminent genius and latching on to whatever lunacies are offered up to explain his failures.
This would be an operatic close to a miserable life, if this idiot were not president. It would merely be a sad decline, if an entire U.S. political party was not devoted to pretending this man's mental confabulations were not real.
But here we are. The man is obviously not right in the head and his staff, his party, his allied lawmakers and his television set are obsessively occupying themselves with pretending that this decaying husk is in fact the Dear Leader this nation has long needed to pull us out of our messy dalliances with laws, norms, and reality.