President’s Unhinged Presser Forecast In Morning Retweet Of Trump Train Mowing Down CNN
While looking for clues as to figure out what had led President Donald Trump to hold his unhinged press conference Tuesday afternoon unraveling, some media looked to his morning Twitter activity.
Early Tuesday morning, Trump re-tweeted a cartoon in which a man identified as CNN gets hit by a train identified as Donald Trump. The vehicular-homicide meme portrayed in the retweet raised eyebrows, coming as it did, so soon after Donald Trump’s stab at damage control over his initial statement about weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which a white supremacist allegedly killed a resident when he deliberately drove his car into a crowd:
The retweet was deleted in minutes and an unidentified White House official told CNN that the retweet had been posted “inadvertently,” lending credibility to the eyebrows. The vanishing retweet had triggered morning news-cycle talk that Trump had been pushed, against his inclination, into making the do-over statement.
Bolstering that theory, Trump Tuesday morning had re-tweeted a Fox News report he seriously is considering a move to pardon ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio, recently convicted of criminal contempt by a federal judge.
Arpaio, a hero in conservative circles, stands accused of violating a court order by continuing patrols that target immigrants; Arpaio maintains the order was not clear and he had not intended to violate it. Trump calls him an American patriot.
Trump this morning also retweeted a tweet from a Mike Holden who said of Trump: “He’s a fascist, so not unusual.” That re-tweet also vanished.
Pundits navel lint gazed about the Twitter activity considered unusual – even by Donald Trump standards.
“It seems almost as if he’s working in overdrive to really undo whatever he said in the West Wing yesterday,” Washington Post reporter Abby Phillip said on CNN this morning.
His press conference seemed to prove her right.
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