Krauthammer on Trump Tweet: ‘I Think He’s Trolling the Press — This CNN Bit I Found Rather Amusing’

Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer offered his thoughts on President Donald Trump’s Twitter habits, which have been a media focus the day after the president tweeted a video of him pummeling a faceless CNN logo.

Krauthammer argued there was nothing wrong with tweeting in general. As for his non-policy tweets, however, The Washington Post columnist said served a psychological purpose for Trump.

“[Y]ou have the sense if they succeeded in stopping him from tweeting, it is like putting a cork in a bottle,” Krauthammer said. “He would implode. This is the way he conducts himself, in which he stabilizes himself psychologically, I would guess, looking from the outside. And it’s not the fact that he tweets. For God’s sake, the Pope tweets. There is nothing wrong with tweeting intrinsically. It’s what you tweet. And Kellyanne Conway is right — three-quarters of what he tweets is about policy and what he’s doing.”

“That’s fine,” he continued. “But then why does he do the other quarter? I mean, I think he is trolling the press. This CNN bit I found it rather amusing. It was meant to drive them crazy, to get an overreaction, to get attention and to sort of heighten the contradictions — if you want to use a Leninist term, between him and the press, his adversaries in the press, and to solidify his base. So, there is some strategy here, not much. The rest is a psychological need, and who knows, perhaps this is therapy for him.”

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