Surprise discovery that Trump is not a nice man

The disintegration proceeds.

The testimony of Mr. Comey and that of Adm. Michael S. Rogers, his National Security Agency counterpart, will most likely enervate and distract Mr. Trump’s administration for weeks, if not longer, overshadowing good news, like the impressive debut of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, his Supreme Court nominee, on the first day of his confirmation hearings Monday.

But it’s the obsessiveness and ferocity of Mr. Trump’s pushback against the Russian allegations, often untethered from fact or tact, that is making an uncertain situation worse.

Mr. Trump’s allies have begun to wonder if his need for self-expression, often on social media, will exceed his instinct for self-preservation, with disastrous results both for the president and for a party whose fate is now tightly tied to his.

Ya think?

Let’s change the wording a little. People who were hoping to profit from Trump’s win are afraid his terrifying brew of rage, narcissism and stupidity will frustrate those hopes. Well yes, of course they are, but what did they expect? Did they think the monstrous ignorant bully we saw during the campaign was going to turn into a reasonable thoughtful adult on January 20th?

Over the past several weeks, Republicans in Congress and members of their staffs have privately complained that Mr. Trump’s Twitter comment on March 4 — the one where he called Barack Obama “sick” and suggested that the former president had ordered a “tapp” on his phone — had done more to undermine anything he’s done as president because it called into question his seriousness about governing.

People keep saying “several weeks” and similar. It’s not several, it’s a little over two. But anyway: yes, of course it did, and his continuing refusal to admit he simply made it up out of his own thick head has only underlined that. But then, again, did anyone ever really believe he had any seriousness about governing? Really? He certainly never gave any sign of such a thing. This seems like buying a bucket of rotting fish and expecting it to become fresh if you wait a few weeks.

So he barfed out those idiotic tweets yesterday morning.

People close to the president say Mr. Trump’s Twitter torrent had less to do with fact, strategy or tactic than a sense of persecution bordering on faith: He simply believes that he was bugged in some way, by someone, and that evidence will soon appear to back him up.

He “believes” that and, crucially, he has no understanding that “belief” is really beside the point. He has no awareness of the need to examine one’s own beliefs, in case they are wrong. He apparently thinks that his belief makes anything he says true.

Still, there’s some evidence that the president’s magic medium is losing its effectiveness, in part because Mr. Trump’s Twitter persona seems to have shifted from puckish to paranoid.

“Puckish”? When was it ever “puckish”? He used it to share his lies about birtherism, to rant about “Crooked Hillary” and “Pocahontas,” to call Alicia Machado “disgusting” and cite a sex tape that doesn’t exist. Racism and misogyny and targeted insults are not “puckish”; they’re evil.

Focus groups and polls conducted by two Democratic strategists this month have shown that many voters, even some who support Mr. Trump, have grown weary of his tweets as president. That was also borne out by a Fox News poll last week, showing that a mere 35 percent of Trump voters approve of his Twitter habits, and that only 16 percent of all voters approve of them. Some 32 percent said they “wish he’d be more careful” with his feed.

“His tweeting defines him, and not in a good way,” said Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster. “Voters not only think Trump’s use of Twitter is unpresidential, they also see the tone and content of his tweets as an indication that he is lacking in self-control.”

That, yes, but he’s also lacking in basic humanity.

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