Monday, August 20, 2018

What did Donald Trump do today?

He had some thoughts about mental health.

Trump spent almost all of his "working vacation" at his luxury golf resort trying to discredit the Mueller probe and its potential witnesses. Today, on his first day back, he extended a 13-day streak of furious tweets attacking key figures in the investigation into the Russia cyberattack that helped elect him. Today's targets included Justice Department employee Bruce Ohr, "Mueller's angry Dems" and former CIA director John Brennan.

Trump has more or less abandoned any attempt to appear innocent of collusion with Russia, and seems focused on discrediting his prosecutors and their witnesses in future legal or impeachment proceedings. (For example, by referring to them as "Disgraced and discredited Bob Mueller and his whole group of Angry Democrat Thugs.") But today's bank-shot attack on a former CIA officer who defended Trump critic John Brennan was especially telling.


The threat itself is not surprising, because Trump administration officials have already told reporters that Trump's personal revocation of Brennan's security clearance was a publicity stunt timed to distract from Omarosa Manigault-Newman's tell-all book, Unhinged

But Trump, who once bragged about passing a dementia pre-screening test, is hypersensitive on the subject of his own mental health and generally avoids the subject even in his angriest tweets. The fact that Trump's apparent mental decline is a major theme of Unhinged may have put him on the offensive.

So what?

  • National security is more important than a president's poll numbers.