Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC John Heilemann said President Donald Trump’s tweets about the special counsel’s investigation show “he is flipping out completely.”
Heilemann said, “One of the consistent through lines in all of our analysis of Donald Trump is you can read his temperature pretty clearly by his Twitter feed. It’s one of the reasons I think his Twitter feed is actually invaluable to all of us. It does give you a window into the mind, such as it is, of the president and his emotional temper.”
He continued, “So 14 on this and ongoing, the number of tweets, vitriol on the tweets, they tend to be when he does something—a Twitter tirade of this kind, it reflects anxiety, fear, panic, anger, lashing out. When he just wants to make a surgical political strike against NFL players kneeling, it’s one or two tweets. They’re controlled. They’re obviously manipulative, but they’re calculated. This is not calculated. This is the raging of a guy who recognizes that something is out of his control, that calculations that were made by others, some people he doesn’t trust and doesn’t like, like Ty Cobb, like John Dowd, the original legal team who he was suspicious of.”
He added, “I just think he looks back on it all and says, wait a minute, people who I never trusted and liked, who were always part of this white shoe Washington legal world, who gave me advice that was always contrary to my instinct, which was to fight and lash out. Cooperate was what they told him. He never liked that. Now he looks at it and says, is this coming back to haunt me in some way? Is there information that’s been told and I don’t know about? I think he is flipping out completely.”
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