Common sense might suggest that Donald Trump would have been quite busy on Monday night. After all, the president was poised to board Air Force One for a trip to China one day later, so it stood to reason that he would take some time to huddle with his team as part of the preparations.
But between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m. ET, the Republican wasn’t focused on Beijing at all. Instead, he posted 55 messages to his social media platform, all of which were bizarre, offensive, conspiratorial or some combination thereof.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s late-night social media “storms” offer “a window into the president’s mind.” Unfortunately, that’s true, though what the public sees when they peer through this window is a powerful man who appears deeply troubled.
There’s obviously no point in shining a light on all 55 items from Trump’s online tantrum, but one of the common threads tying together many of the posts is the president’s fixation on Barack Obama. One item the Republican amplified, for example, accused the former Democratic president of attempting a coup in 2016, while another suggested that Obama secretly conspired with the CIA against Trump. One alleged that Obama has benefited financially from “Obamacare” royalties (an unintentionally hilarious claim stemming from a satirical website), while another accused the former president of having committed “the most heinous crimes committed in American history.”
In one especially notable instance, Trump also posted a quote from Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana that was entirely made up.
This is just a sampling from a ridiculous list, though it was of particular interest to see the incumbent president call for his predecessor’s arrest. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump shared a Truth Social post late Monday night that called for the arrest of Barack Obama, accusing the former president of treason, without evidence. […]
“Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all at once for treachery, treason, and seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government. But first, Barack Obama,” the end of the post read.
That conclusion was bonkers. The rest of the missive, which Trump promoted and amplified but did not personally write, wasn’t any better.
Part of what makes this notable is the familiarity of the circumstances. Last summer, Trump posted an avalanche of odd content to his platform, including calls for criminal charges against Obama. Earlier this year, it happened again, with another flurry of online madness that included accusations that Obama committed “treason,” followed by a separate missive that concluded, “ARREST OBAMA NOW.”
In February he did it yet again, except this tweet storm also included a racist video depicting Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle.
To the extent that Trump’s rage-tweeting offers “a window into the president’s mind,” it’s fair to say that Obama dominates the incumbent’s psyche in ways that appear rather deranged. The White House has already confronted a public conversation it had hoped to avoid over Trump’s mental fitness and stability, and this won’t help.
But I’m also interested in how the president’s vengeful messages are interpreted by the Justice Department. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his team have made little effort to hide their eagerness to target Trump’s enemies, which makes the latest tweet storm difficult to shrug off.
The more Trump amplifies demands that Obama face criminal charges — reality and propriety be damned — the more one wonders whether prosecutors and investigators at Main Justice might take this madness seriously, either because they fear getting fired or because they’re true believers brought on to advance the cause of weaponized federal law enforcement.
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