You can’t really say that Donald Trump has gone off the rails. Trump was born without rails. Never, not in his entire life, has the idea of “that doesn’t make sense” flashed a warning light inside the orange dome. But even considering that Trump’s been traveling cross-country for a long time, this morning’s set of tweets are still remarkable examples of Trump’s twisted “logic.”
There’s the initial effort to denigrate the investigation.
After 7 months of investigations & committee hearings about my "collusion with the Russians," nobody has been able to show any proof. Sad!
Then a swing at the media.
The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media - over 100 million people! I can go around them.
Wait. 100 million? Sure. Plus or minus 68 million.
And that’s not the craziest thing Trump tweeted this morning. Not by a long shot.
After the math exercise, Trump returned to his summer home in Salem, Massachusetts, for more witch hunting.
The actual number of jobs added since Trump took the helm is both less than the number added in the same period last year and a drop from the last months of the Obama administration. Evidence that any of his regulation cuts have done anything but reward owners at the cost of workers? Nothing.
But all this was just warm up for this tweet.
What. Does. This. Mean?
There is no reasonable solution, but the closest it’s possible to get is that Trump is talking here about Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein produced a memo about issues with Comey that was the go-to reason for why the former FBI director was fired for the first 24 hours after Comey was sent packing. But the reason Trump surrogates then stopped pointing at Rosenstein was that Trump stomped all over that excuse in a live interview with Lester Holt.
[R]egardless of recommendation I was going to fire Comey. Knowing, there was no good time to do it. And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won. And the reason they should have won it is the electoral college is almost impossible for a Republican to win. [….]
The person who told Trump to fire Comey … was Trump.
The second nuts-factor embedded in that last tweet is the idea that Rosenstein is running the investigation. He’s not. That’s why there’s a special counsel. S… P… E… C… I.. A… L. C… O… U… N… S… E… L. It’s a position which by definition has a high degree of independence from any other slot in the DOJ.
Of course, Rosenstein is the only person directly empowered to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And for Trump, the ability to fire and “leadership” are probably synonyms.