He just can’t let it go. Obsessively attacking two Republican-friendly white upper class media celebrities can only hurt him and the Republican agenda, but he just can’t help himself:
Melania did say he punches back ten times harder, and maybe she meant that literally—he will have to tweet about his latest “enemies” ten times, each time using a different set of grade-school insults.
And for the millionth time, pundits ask if this latest embarrassment is going to be the last straw that ends Republicans’ support for Trump. As the headline of Kathleen Parker’s Washington Post opinion piece plaintively asks yet agaiin, “Is this it for Trump?”
For months, Trump watchers have wondered: What will it take?
Meaning: What would finally force Republicans to face the fact, so obvious to so many, that President Trump isn’t quite right? Not in the correct sense but in the head sense.
The answer, apparently, is Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
At least Parker has the good sense to answer her own question correctly:
To the point, is this it? My friends, don’t count on it.
Unfortunately, this won’t be it for Trump until 2018 at the very earliest. But please proceed with the unhinged tweets. They can only help Democrats in 2018 and 2020. And every minute Trump spends tweeting and fuming over stuff like this is a minute he isn’t spending on his efforts to destroy the world.
Update: Some in the comments suggested that Trump is doing this to distract from even more damaging things, such as the most recent bombshell revelation by a British cyber analyst about being recruited by the Trump campaign to help collude with Russian hacking, or Senate Republicans’ continued efforts to strip healthcare from Americans to pay for tax cuts. Just to be safe from inadvertently helping to distract from those, I’m linking to stories about those issues here, following the excellent suggestion from Dave in Columbus in the comments below:
To every Trump inanity tweet/comment/story, add a parenthetical “(Meamwhile XXX.)”
For example:
Again today Trump tweeted illiterate, misspelled, insane, lies. (Meanwhile, Peter Smith.)
But, while distraction may be a partial effect of Trump’s continual tweeting of outrageous insults, I don’t think these unhinged tweets are helping him, because they just add to the general impression of Trump being unreasonable, vindictive, unhinged, and cruel, which will lead more Americans (including some Republicans since Trump is targeting Republicans) to believe Russian collusion allegations against Trump and be skeptical of Trumpcare. Also I don’t think Trump is rational enough to be tweeting insults as a distraction on purpose—these insults are too extreme and unhinged to be the result of rational thought. They are also embedded among a whole bunch of other stream-of-consciousness tweets, including some that do refer to his Russia collusion scandal and his horrid plan to repeal Obamacare, so he isn’t just trying to bury news about those. Imagine if, right after the Comey letter, Hillary had tweeted childish insults at moderate Democratic media figures who criticized her—would anyone say that helped her distract from the Comey letter? No, it would have cost her even more votes. Apply the same logic to Trump.