Trump spends a morning at home tweeting his heart out
Plummeting in the polls and confined to the White House with nothing on his public schedule, President Trump spent much of Wednesday morning — exactly four years after he narrowly avoided a collapse in support over the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes — sending out a frenzy of tweets and retweets that were extraordinary in their volume and vehemence even by his standards.
They included a warning about Sen. Kamala Harris’s left-wing proclivities that contained the cryptic, if ominous, warning that “[Joe] Biden would not last a month!”
The invaluable Trump Twitter Archive recorded 52 tweets and retweets from the president’s Twitter account between 7:18 and 10:20 a.m., an average of about 17 per hour. That included one tweet that was deleted and then reposted 10 minutes later to correct the misspelling of “caught” (spelled “cought” in the original):
Trump’s fixation on rehashing the investigation of his 2016 campaign was on full display, including in two tweets, the first of which announced he was authorizing “the total Declassification” of documents related to “the Russia Hoax”...
...and the second, 40 minutes later, acknowledging that he had already done that, but that “people,” apparently including his own Justice Department, “have acted very slowly” in prosecuting “the biggest political crime in the history of our Country”:
He also returned to a theme from the night before, the stalled talks on a new pandemic stimulus bill, telling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “Move Fast, I Am Waiting To Sign!” That apparently referred to his offer to authorize a new round of individual $1,200 payments.
If Pelosi has been reluctant to take him up on it, it might be because just a few hours earlier he had announced he was calling off negotiations with the Democrats until after the election.
As New York City tried to tamp down a spike in coronavirus infections in some neighborhoods, Trump retweeted a post by the actor James Woods, showing police breaking up a crowded outdoor celebration of the Sukkoth holiday by Hasidic Jews, a community that has resisted social distancing regulations and has been hit hard by the outbreak. Woods drew an implicit comparison to Nazi Germany, calling Mayor Bill de Blasio a “criminal” and “an anti-Semite thug,” and referencing his German ancestry (“No wonder he changed his name from Wilhelm”).
Trump retweeted Woods’s post, adding his own all-purpose, if dubiously relevant, gloss on the situation: “I am the only thing in the Radical Left’s way!”
The barrage of tweets led to a post by the anti-Trump Republican group the Lincoln Project:
Dexamethasone, a steroid that Trump has been receiving as part of his treatment for COVID-19, is known to have powerful psychological and emotional effects, including feelings of euphoria and omnipotence, but also anxiety and depression. Sean Conley, the White House physician, released an update on Trump’s medical condition on Monday that began: “The president this morning says, ‘I feel great.’”
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