Donald Trump desperately tries to create a Sunday morning distraction

| 2:26 pm EDT August 26, 2018
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For Donald Trump, the only thing worse than a Sunday morning full of headlines about his criminal scandals is a Sunday morning full of honorifics about the late John McCain. Trump’s scandals are closing in on him by the minute as his allies cut plea deals against him, and he never could hide his jealousy of McCain’s status as an American hero. So what did Trump do this morning? He tried to create a distraction in rather desperate, if also rather ineffective, fashion.

Donald Trump spent the morning retweeting some of his most ridiculous tweets of the last week. This included the one where he made up a phony scandal about Hillary Clinton and the FBI, and then all but begged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a phony investigation into it. This also included his false claim that conservatives are being banned from social media for voicing conservative views. But that didn’t work, so Trump moved on to some different kinds of lies.

Trump claimed this morning that the stock market reached a record high on Friday, and gave himself credit for it. But the truth is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now eight hundred points lower than it was in January. The NASDAQ and S&P reached highs, but it’s dishonest to claim that these mean the “stock market” is at a high, as the DJIA is almost universally viewed as the de facto stock market indicator. This is the second time that Trump has made this false claim in the past twenty-four hours, even though he was called out for it the first time.

Strangely, even though Donald Trump is so desperate for a distraction that he’s willing to retweet old garbage and repeat his own earlier lies, this came off as a rather pathetic effort. There was no new rant or meltdown, and this morning’s tweets and retweets could easily have been posted by one of his staffers. Is Trump out of gas?