Why Trump Tweets

President Trump's indiscriminate use of Twitter has once again put the political world in an uproar. Yesterday morning, he used it to accuse President Obama of ordering wiretaps on telephones in Trump Tower during the campaign. He then asked Congress to include the wiretaps in their investigations of Russian influence in the election. Forceful denials were swift in coming from a variety of players in the Obama administration. Interestingly, they emphasized that Obama hadn't ordered any such tap, and remained suggestively silent on whether there had actually been such a tap. In fact, it has already been reported that the FBI acquired a warrant based on communication between a server in Trump Tower and a Russian bank known to be close to Putin, and that nothing came of it. The obvious question to ask is why Trump would make such a wild accusation, seemingly at random, on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday morning.

I will freely admit my frustration that this sort of thing is still reported on as if it is shocking. In the first place, this is hardly the first or most deranged accusation Trump has hurled at someone in the last two years. Leaving aside the entire birther nonsense, the reader may recall that just before the Indiana primary he implied that Ted Cruz's father Raphael was involved in the Kennedy assassination.* But that leaves open the question of how to interpret Trump's outbursts. It may have become commonplace, but why does he bother with doing it at all?

There is an adage in politics that I have frequently seen attributed to Ronald Reagan; "if you're explaining, you're losing." That is to say, if you are a politician and find yourself having to try to explain away a problem, things are not going well for you. Even a good explanation will only remind people about the original problem. The only solution is to change the subject. Trump's tweets are intentionally provactive, because provocation demands media coverage. The more the press cover What-Trump-Said-This-Time, the less they cover what they were covering the day before. 

This week, Trump had hoped that the press would be covering his well-recieved Joint Session speech on Tuesday. By the end of the week, the dominant story would be not session, but Sessions. The Attorney General's discussions with the Russian Ambassador last year stepped on Trump's ability to capitalize on the speech. The tweets are his attempt to regain control of the narrative.

By injecting his claims about Obama into the investigation, he is attempting to take an issue that the country largely agrees on - Russian influence in our elections is bad - and turn it into a question of party loyalty. By implicating Obama he implies that the entire investigation is politically motivated. At worst for him, it provides a distraction from unflattering questions about his campaign. At best for him, it ultimately neuters the investigation by polarizing attitudes. It is a political sleight-of-hand.

That having been established, it may or may not ultimately be a successful one. The point is that Trump regularly pulls this sort of thing, and I've never seen him do it without some good reason. He is not, his public image and crippling personality flaws notwithstanding, simply a throbbing id in a suit. When examining the statements of any politician it is necessary to look past what is said, and focus on what purpose is served by saying it. It is especially so with Trump, who is more apt to shock us than a conventional politician and therefore more likely to be successful in his games of perception and distraction. 

*He was not.