Donald Trump’s Easter morning Twitter rant is his strangest holiday meltdown yet

| 6:58 pm EDT April 16, 2017
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Donald Trump, even after he was named the winner of the 2016 presidential election, has struggled to provide any real leadership – or even coherence – when it comes to holidays. For instance on New Years Eve during the transition period, he used Twitter to lord over his “many enemies” instead of offering good tidings (link). So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump also did poorly on Easter morning today. But this latest holiday meltdown might be his strangest yet.

After North Korea tested a missile last night in defiance of Donald Trump’s posturing, he appeared to wake up in a bad mood this morning. He tweeted “Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem? We will see what happens!” (link). It was a strangely enough worded message that some observers weren’t sure if he was renewing his previous attacks on China, or if he was trying to deny that his previous attacks on China ever took place.

Then someone appeared to have reminded Trump that it was Easter, and six minutes later he generically tweeted “Happy Easter to everyone!” (link), or his staff may have simply tweeted it on his behalf. But from there is was right back to unhinged complaining. Half an hour later Trump was ranting about the electoral college and his own lack of tax returns (link), and then he began falsely accusing yesterday’s protesters of having been paid (link).

Normally we’d just recommend that Trump spend some time with Twitter for Dummies (link). But while we’ve heard some of these rants from him before, why now? Why on a holiday? And why was he throwing every ounce of rhetoric he had at the wall, all at once? Normally he flips out on one topic at a time.

As we touched on earlier today, Trump’s high-risk low-reward North Korea gambit is going poorly for him by any measure (link), and last night was the nadir. He may now be trying to distract from it. Or he may have merely woken up in a bad mood because of his failure. Perhaps we should be relieved that, rather than pressing an actual nuclear button this morning, Trump opted to merely go nuclear on Twitter. Despite his endless anger issues, social media wars may be all he’s truly capable of. Contribute to Palmer Report