Donald Trump’s eerie silence

| 11:15 pm EDT September 2, 2018
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On Friday evening, Donald Trump was posting so many absurd tweets in such rapid fashion, I felt compelled to jokingly ask him to slow down so I could take a bathroom break without missing the part where he started confessing to things. Then yesterday, when the adults in politics were at John McCain’s funeral, Trump was busy tweeting up a storm all day, desperate for attention. He even began frantically retweeting himself at one point.

As a political analyst, it’s a relief when Donald Trump occasionally stays off Twitter for a day, or even most of a day. It means I can take a break from trying to decode his latest eruption of criminal psychopathy, which is good for time management, and good for the soul. But it’s also unnerving, because most of the time, Trump’s silence ends up meaning something. Either something in his scandals is about to drop that’s got him spooked into silence, or he’s about to roll out his next big scheme. The trouble is figuring out what the silence means.

Yes, Donald Trump was at his golf resort today. But that doesn’t tell us anything, because he was there yesterday too. Even when you’re a terrible golfer like Trump, a full round is unlikely to take you more than four hours. So why hasn’t he tweeted anything in thirteen hours? All he posted today was a weirdly delusional rant this morning about how black people love him. The rest of the day, he’s had nothing to say? After he posted sixteen tweets yesterday over a twelve hour span?

Maybe it means nothing. Perhaps Donald Trump wore himself out yesterday while trying to compete with the late John McCain for attention, and by today he’d run out of excrement to throw at the wall. He’ll be frantically tweeting again tomorrow, or whenever. But I’ve seen one too many times that Trump going silent has ended up signaling that something big was about to burst from under the surface. I just can’t tell you what it is this time around.