Donald Trump’s about face

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The trouble with interpreting Donald Trump’s behavior is that, objectively speaking, he’s not a normal person – or a rational person – or even a mentally stable person. On some level, political analysts are like profilers on Criminal Minds, trying to get inside the head of someone whose head should never be gotten inside of, all for the sake of trying to figure out how to defeat him. Trump made a bizarre about-face yesterday, and it leaves us with more questions than answers.

Based on what various White House pool reporters tweeted about the matter, along with the publicly visible behavior we subsequently saw from him, here’s how we understand the day’s events. Yesterday Donald Trump walked out of the White House dressed in golfing attire, got into the motorcade, got right back out of the motorcade, went back into the White House, spent three hours stewing, and then exploded on Twitter about how unfair it is that certain Republican politicians are being indicted for their crimes. The mind reels.

Maybe this was just Trump being Trump. But what does that even mean anymore? The guy acts weirder by the day. Is his mind now so scrambled, he gets in the car and then immediately abandons his plans for the day, for no particular reason? Did he get bad news in that moment that we don’t yet know about? Did it ruin his mood to the point that he no longer felt like blowing off steam on the golf course, or suddenly felt compelled to lock himself away and come up with a Twitter response?

The White House tried to gloss this over by issuing vague statements about Donald Trump deciding he needed to focus on trade deals. But if that had been the case, wouldn’t his resulting Twitter rants have been about that same topic? We know how much he loves ranting about trade deals in general. No, his topic of obsession after his motorcade about-face was the Republican politicians who keep getting busted for their crimes. But does he know more than we do, or is his brain simply functioning less than ever? At this point you can interpret all of this any way you like.