The Twitter barrage on Monday and Tuesday also points that way. First, Trump got into a strange sniping match with CNN’s Jim Acosta, the TV pool reporter of the day, in which they called each other fake news (yes, this happened) and Trump claimed to have given a press conference he had not held. Next, he complained that the press hadn’t congratulated him enough for calling racism evil:

Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied...truly bad people! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2017

Then he retweeted the alt-right figure Jack Posobiec, a leading exponent of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, about violence in Chicago:

Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that? https://t.co/9Crutnnrp8 — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 14, 2017

The convoluted argument is that the media are biased by focusing on instances of racial violence by white nationalists and ignoring violence inside the black community. That conveniently ignores the ways in which mass rallies of white supremacists are different from ordinary crime, and it spreads the idea that African Americans are violent.

Tuesday morning, the president added in a retweet of a meme that showed a figure with a CNN logo on his head trying to stop a Trump train:

It’s not worth thinking too deeply about this image—the original tweeter noted the CNN figure isn’t really being run over, but is simply failing to stop the train—except as red meat to the CNN- and media-hating side of Trump’s base. He deleted the retweet, and the White House said he hadn’t meant to tweet it. This seems plausible, since he also accidentally retweeted someone calling him (or perhaps Joe Arpaio) a fascist around the same time, but it’s also in keeping with another, equally silly CNN meme he tweeted several weeks ago.

Adding more reason to believe that this is the more genuine Trump, the Associated Press reports that the president had to be cajoled into making a second statement on the Charlottesville attacks by advisers:

Loath to appear to be admitting a mistake, Trump was reluctant to adjust his remarks. The president had indicated to advisers before his initial statement Saturday that he wanted to stress a need for law and order, which he did. He later expressed anger to those close to him about what he perceived as the media’s unfair assessment of his remarks, believing he had effectively denounced all forms of bigotry, according to outside advisers and White House officials. Several of Trump’s senior advisers, including new chief of staff John Kelly, had urged him to make a more specific condemnation, warning that the negative story would not go away and that the rising tide of criticism from fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill could endanger his legislative agenda, according to two White House officials.

Regardless of which Trump is real, his split personalities produce consequential disjunctures. On several occasions, the president has made a controversial statement, left advisers to try to defend it publicly, and then pulled the rug out from under them. This happened when Trump claimed he fired FBI Director James Comey after receiving a memo critical of his handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton; Vice President Pence and others dutifully repeated that until Trump himself told Lester Holt that actually he had already decided before he got the memo, and that the cause was the Russia investigation.