LOSING IT: Trump posts disturbed Truth Social rant that has people worried

When things go badly for Donald Trump, he scurries to his social media to vent his spleen in an unhinged rant and seek support from his MAGA hordes.

On Saturday, he really exploded, with two separate multi-post rants that touched on overlapping subject matter, all boiling down to his sense that the walls are closing in on him.

Trump’s posts were, as so often is the case, a veritable Gish gallop of claims disproven and unproven, misleading statements and implications, name-calling, and random capitalization.

Among other things, he claimed that:

• the Presidential Records Act protects his possession of documents at Mar-a-Lago (false);
• that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was illegal (it was a properly executed search warrant, not a raid);
• and that he was handling those documents appropriately (the FBI didn’t move in until they received an inside tip that documents were being relocated out of the locked storage room).

One of the primary points Trump seemed to be communicating — between his caps-lock rages and run-on rants — was that the Special Counsel appointed to his case, and the one appointed to investigate President Joe Biden’s possession of documents, are not likely (he feels) to treat the two very different situations equally, or, as Trump would prefer, treat Biden’s transparency and immediate return of documents as more severe and criminal than his own refusal to do so.

He describes Jack Smith, the Special Counsel on his case, as a “thug” and a “flame-throwing lunatic” who is friends with “the most evil, angry, & disgusting Marxists & Communists,” but deems Robert Hur, who is appointed to Biden’s case, a “nice guy,” who is liked by “Democrats and RINOs.”

He doesn’t mention that he himself, Trump, appointed Hur as a U.S. Attorney.

Trump’s rant opens:

“What Biden did was wrong, but he was given a reasonable and stable Special Counsel who is sane, inclined not to make waves, friendly with RINOS, and is not known as a flame-throwing lunatic or a Biden hater. What I did was RIGHT, Secured documents in a secured place, lock on the doors, guards and Secret Service all around, security cameras working.”

Of course, it’s true that there were high levels of security at Mar-a-Lago.

In fact, the U.S. government even subpoenaed some of the security camera footage in order to verify their tip that documents were being moved out of the locked storeroom, which Trump had already been ordered to secure.

He went on to repeat the fiction that he and NARA were coming to terms — at the point when the search warrant was executed, Trump’s attorneys had already returned a statement promising that all documents had been returned.

He also repeats the lie that the Presidential Records Act is the relevant law, pointing out that it isn’t a criminal statute. (The Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, both of which were cited in documentation leading to the search warrant, however, do have criminal penalties.)

As for whether he’s guilty of wrongdoing — well, that’s not for the subject of an investigation to decide.

Hours later, Trump dropped the next rant, this one only the length of a single post, and focused on comparing the two Special Counsels, with a brief diversion at the end to complain about multiple investigations and Grand Juries looking into his actions.

After this, Trump took a few minutes off to seethe before starting the second three-post rant.

This one goes all the way back to his former “fixer” Michael Cohen testifying against him, which began in his testimony before Congress in 2019 and has continued as Cohen reportedly spoke to prosecutors in the case against the Trump Organization for tax fraud.

He claims that it’s “open season on lawyers,” since more than one of his own attorneys has now been questioned in one capacity or another.

Rudy Giuliani has even had his law license stripped, and may lose it permanently, for pushing false claims about the 2020 election in court.

This is where Trump really seems to get fired up, claiming that it’s all a matter of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” “radical left thugs,” and an agenda to “get Trump.”

By the last post in the series, he’s fallen into all-caps text-screaming, repeating his prior complaints, listing the “hoaxes,” as he calls every accusation against him, and finally listing everything he believes is wrong with America under President Biden.

His “hoaxes” include;

• the Russian collusion investigation (in which Mueller laid out multiple incidents of concern in his report before Republicans lied to the American people and claimed it exonerated the then-president);
• the “rigged 2020 Presidential election” (for which no evidence of election fraud has yet been produced);
• and the nothing-burger “Twitter files,'”which only showed that both Republicans and Democrats contacted Twitter at various times to report concerns about rule violations.

The takeaway from this all appears to be that Trump knows or believes that the appointment of a Special Counsel in Biden’s case will help to reveal just how different the two cases are in virtually every sense that matters, including intent and cooperation with authorities, and that he is genuinely concerned that either the document case — or one of the many others he’s facing — may be getting close to meting out actual consequences.

Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.