As my Washington Post colleagues Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker reported, that was not how Trump approached the current moment: “Ten days before the Nov. 6 elections and facing a host of controversies and crises, Trump has not merely struggled to unify the country — he has shown little interest in trying. Time and again, the former reality television impresario has sought to sow discord, betting that most Americans prefer his pugilistic, divisive style over the sanitized mold of his predecessors.”

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Many will focus on Trump’s persistence in holding campaign rallies or his falsehood about how the New York Stock Exchange opened the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, or one of a hundred other things Trump did or did not do in the wake of events. I will leave those explorations to more deft columnists. What I would like to focus on is one of Trump’s more innocuous tweets and what it tells us about his presidency.

On Saturday, the Boston Red Sox rallied from a four-run deficit in the last three innings to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 9-6. The rally started after Dodgers skipper (and eternal Red Sox hero) Dave Roberts pulled starter Rich Hill, who had allowed only one hit over 6⅓ innings. After that, many bad things happened to the Dodgers.

As this was unfolding, and after two campaign rallies on the day an apparent anti-Semite was accused of shooting up a synagogue, the president tweeted the following:

In the annals of Trump rhetoric, this qualifies as innocuous. And yet there are three important lessons that can be drawn from this tweet, and they say a lot about the Trump presidency.

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The first is that Trump’s analysis proved to be uninformed. As Roberts said after the game, Hill had told him before the start of the seventh inning, “Keep an eye on me. I’m going to give it everything I have. Let’s go hitter to hitter, and just keep an eye on me.” The Dodgers manager elaborated on the meaning of that comment:

Roberts made it seem as if he would not have gone to his bullpen if Hill hadn't previously told him to keep a close eye on him. “I’ve never heard it,” Roberts said when asked how rare it was to hear Hill tell him something like that. “You’re talking about a World Series game where there’s no margin up to that point, and there’s a lot of emotions, intensity, effort, focus, and he did everything. He did everything to put us in a position to win a baseball game. And, again, we’ve got to do a better job of picking him up.”

This does not mean that Roberts managed the game perfectly, but it is also information that helps explain why he did what he did.

Obviously, Trump did not have that data point when he tweeted. Neither did every other armchair analyst who tweeted something similar. The point, however, is that in contrast to all of his predecessors, Trump opines and judges events impulsively. Unfortunately, this is not confined to his baseball tweets, but pretty much everything. When Trump tweets about events happening in real time, he is usually operating on bad or radically incomplete information. It is, let’s say, disturbing that the man in charge of the world’s largest intelligence-gathering organizations mostly relies on “Fox & Friends” for information.

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This relates to the second lesson one can draw from Trump’s World Series tweet: It helps explain how a self-proclaimed billionaire Ivy Leaguer with rococo tastes can have such a populist following. It is precisely because Trump tweeted what he did, when he did, that he seems more like a regular guy. Some version of that tweet was probably uttered by half the people watching that game in that moment. It’s the natural, impulsive response. And when supporters see that their president has the exact same reaction to it that they do, it helps cement their affinity to him.

Other presidents might try to connect through empathy or common goals; Trump does it by putting all of his human flaws on display.

The third lesson from the tweet is that Trump wants it both ways as president. He wants — nay, craves — all the respect and legitimacy that the office usually possesses. As the president of the United States, Trump thinks he deserves the deference accorded to heads of state and government. Because he personalizes everything, he interprets any criticism of him as a direct challenge to his political legitimacy.

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But there are times when Trump does not want to be the president, he just wants to be a guy venting about the World Series or his Twitter account or his media coverage. He thinks he’s on the same level as the media, not above them as the commander in chief:

This isn’t limited to baseball. Trump has blasted the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates, raising questions about the Fed’s independence. He has excoriated the Justice Department multiple times for not investigating his political opponents and called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

When the White House has been asked about the appropriateness of these comments, the response has been something along the lines of, “Trump is simply expressing his own opinion, he is not pressuring anybody.” That is how chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow tried to explain away Trump’s Fed criticism, how press secretary Sarah Sanders attempted to explain Trump’s criticisms of Mueller and how the president’s lawyers rationalized his statements on Sessions. Their argument, distilled to its essence, is that there’s nothing wrong with the president exercising his freedom of speech. In those moments, he is not the president, he’s just a guy, so his words carry no authority.

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It is altogether fitting that the Trump White House says the president’s words do not carry any authority or responsibility because that is how Trump thinks about it as well. As Parker and Rucker reported:

Later Friday afternoon, as he departed Washington for a rally in Charlotte, Trump told reporters he has no plans to tone down his rhetoric — “I could really tone it up,” he said — and noted that the suspect “was a person that preferred me over others.” He also rejected the notion of responsibility: “There’s no blame. There’s no anything.”

If the president does not always think of himself as the president, then expecting any kind of lasting, unifying rhetoric is a fool’s errand. Trump is who he is, a guy who thinks of himself as a guy unless being the president gains him an advantage. He simply does not believe in the power of the bully pulpit to do anything other than energize his base. And he is offended when anyone else thinks differently.