President Donald Trump woke up Tuesday morning and went berserk.
The American people are used to his almost-daily early morning tweet spasms, but this morning felt different. More manic. More paranoid.
Let’s look at the President’s day so far.
6:28 AM:
Trump, as usual, kicks off his day with a tweet attacking the Russia investigation.
Only recently has he started to name Special Counsel Robert Mueller, although he has yet to give him a nickname. (Expect that to happen at some point soon.)
Trump’s word choices seem stranger than usual.
“19,000 demanded Text messages”?
“now under protest!”?
Take a look:
In reality, those text messages were not “illegally deleted.” An FBI inspector general report cited “a technology failure by the FBI’s tool meant to sweep up text messages,” Politico reports. And they were recovered.
6:41 AM:
Trump wishes “good luck” to his former National Security Advisor and campaign trail BFF. Remember, Trump asked Jim Comey – before he fired him as FBI Director – to ignore Mike Flynn’s transgressions. Like, lying to the FBI, working for and being paid by a foreign government while working on the Trump campaign and in the White House.
That “tremendous pressure” conspiracy theory was blown to smithereens Monday night when, at the direction of the judge who will sentence Flynn today, Mueller released the transcript of the FBI’s interview of Mike Flynn, who clearly lied. A lot.
RELATED: ‘VERY DAMNING’ ‘LIED. A LOT’: MUELLER JUST RELEASED FLYNN’S FBI INTERVIEW AND TWITTER IS ALL OVER IT
Sure looks like someone is worried about “Russian Collusion.”
(Oh, and Hillary won the popular election by nearly 3 million votes.)
7:13 AM:
Trump is all over the map.
First it’s the “Mueller Witch Hunt,” then it’s a “good luck” message to his BFF, and a “no Collusion” plug, and now, the Fed?
Here the President of the United States is taking the unprecedented step of trying to – publicly, no less – manipulate the markets by telling the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to stop raising interest rates.
The Fed is an independent agency that is not supposed to be told what to do by the President or anyone else. That’s how they stay independent.
“Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers,” Trump tells Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who Trump installed in February, after replacing Janet Yellen because he thought she was too short for the job, according to The Washington Post.
7:26 AM:
Trump is furious that he’s losing Twitter followers. Naturally, it’s not his fault. It’s not his crazy, maniacal tweets at all hours of the day and night. It’s not his anger, his nastiness, or anything else. It’s Twitter’s fault.
This time, there’s an ounce of truth to his anger.
Most of Trump’s followers on Twitter are bots, or spam, or fake, or inactive accounts. 61%, to be precise.
That’s according to SparkToro, “a service that analyzes Twitter accounts to estimate what percent of their followers are bots, spam, propaganda, or inactive accounts.”
Twitter has been deleting bot and fake accounts.
(By the way, the same service found that President Obama, who has a lot more Twitter followers, has a lot less bots or fake followers.)
As for Trump’s claim that social media platforms are “so biased toward the Dems,” that’s totally false. In fact, the opposite is true:
7:55 AM:
Here we go. “Illegal immigration.”
Trump’s claim is a lie. It was a lie when he said it was $113 billion a year. It is a lie now.
8:14 AM:
We’re back to the Steele Dossier!
While the infamous “pee tape” has never been proven to exist, other parts of the dossier have been proven true.
The highly-respected Lawfare blog reported just this past Friday, “the Steele dossier, we believe, holds up well so far,” while noting there’s “a good deal in the dossier that has not been corroborated in the official record and perhaps never will be.”
As for Trump’s claim the “the FISA WARRANTS and the whole Russian Witch Hunt is a Fraud and a Hoax,” well, just ask the 33 people and 3 companies who have been indicted or pleaded guilty, so far, that we know of.