Donald Trump’s frantic hundred-tweet weekend gives away something big

| 7:11 pm EDT May 12, 2019
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Most of you are probably spending this weekend relaxing, working, or spending Mother’s Day with loved ones. The “President” of the United States has been spending this weekend racking up data overages on his phone. By our count – which admittedly could be off a bit, thanks to the brain cells that are lost just by looking at Trump’s Twitter timeline – he’s now posted more than a hundred tweets and retweets since the weekend began.

For reference, this is cartoonishly over the top even by Donald Trump’s standards. Not long ago, everyone was stunned when Trump managed to rack up thirty tweets and retweets in one weekend. We’ve always been able to draw a fairly straight line between the sheer number of Trump’s tweets and his level of paranoid frantic fear about his scandals. His new hundred-plus meltdown, a combination of his barely coherent screeds and sycophantic retweets of his remaining supporters, gives away a lot.

For instance, this morning Trump retweeted a pundit who was all but begging Robert Mueller not to testify. Translation: Trump’s legal team has told him that there’s no method for even trying to stop Mueller’s testimony, and so Trump has resorted to trying to use retweets to change Mueller’s mind. Good luck with that. Last night Trump launched a personal attack on Don McGahn, another person he can’t stop from testifying. Then there’s the retweet begging Mitch McConnell to magically cancel the Senate Intel Committee’s subpoena against Donald Trump Jr.

Donald Trump is now trying to create his own alternate reality in which he can somehow stop people from testifying by tweeting about them, and he can make subpoenas go away by retweeting about them. This past week, after his embarrassing older tax returns surfaced, he tried to claim – in the same tweet – that what he did was legal, and that he didn’t do it. Trump is now tweeting for an audience of one: himself. He’s merely trying to convince himself that it’s all going to be okay for him. It won’t be. Retweets aren’t magic wands.