Ah, Monday morning in a very normal country. Time to take a sip of coffee and—

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

As usual, it's instructive to view this Official Presidential Communication as just that: a statement from the President of the United States:



This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

A statement by the President: pic.twitter.com/0Xs5vL4FP2 — Alt Real Press Sec Bot (@RealPressSecBot) July 23, 2018

As a general rule, the world's most powerful man probably shouldn't rattle off run-on sentences in ALL CAPS like a deranged Internet commenter—except he's not going on about the new Star Wars movie, he's threatening a nation of 80 million people with nuclear annihilation.

Now, we are forced to engage in yet another discussion of whether Donald Trump, American president, is playing six-dimensional chess to distract people from some other news item, or whether he is really just nuts. (There's also the meta-debate about whether to cover these hysterical outbursts as news at all. But a hysterical outburst from the president is news.) The argument for the former explanation is that his onetime campaign foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, just admitted on CNN Sunday that he was also—at the same time, while advising an American presidential campaign—an "informal adviser" to the Kremlin:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Carter Page grudgingly admits that he was an ‘informal advisor’ to the Kremlin if Jake really wants to call him that. Then Jake reads a letter where Page calls himself “an informal advisor to the Kremlin”. pic.twitter.com/0gG1jbNNnn — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 23, 2018

This follows the Justice Department's release of a FISA warrant the FBI sought for Page when counterintelligence investigators assembled enough evidence to suggest probable cause that Page was a Russian agent. The court ruled in the government's favor, and they were granted permission to wiretap Page. You can tell this was a concern to the president because he proceeded to start screaming about it on Twitter. Both Trump and some talking heads on his pravda network suggested the released documents proved the surveillance of Page was based only on the infamous Dossier, and the whole thing was just a politically motivated attempt to target the Trump campaign. The documents did not prove this, but you may have noticed that this theme—where Trump campaign advisers were simultaneously working as agents of foreign governments—just keeps popping up.

Getty Images

Trump also likely has the revelation of Michael Cohen's payoff tape on his mind. But in the end, does it really matter? Trump might indeed be creating a new shiny object by shrieking threats at Iran on Twitter. (This, after he previously tore up a nuclear non-proliferation deal between the mideast country, the U.S., and a number of our European allies, at least in part because Obama Did It.) The risk there is that this might be the tail wagging the dog, a prelude to a ginned-up war to provide further distraction. Or maybe he's just batshit insane, or knows nothing. Like on the SAT, it's always tempting to circle "All of the Above."

The effect is the same in any of those scenarios: to destabilize and horrify the watching world, to further degrade the presidency of the United States, and to make ever more urgent the necessity of removing Donald Trump from a position of influence over world affairs.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io