On MSNBC this morning, Bloomberg Opinion executive editor and Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said that President Donald Trump clearly relishes brawls with his political rivals.

“He operates most of the time on one level,” he told David Gura, “which is opposition, paranoia, dissent, division. He’s profoundly anti-institutional in a profoundly irresponsible way for the President of the United States. And he personalizes that by doing things like going after John Roberts or going after Jay Powell, both who are prosecute presiding over institutions that are a part of a government that is defined by the separation of powers.”

And he does it, O’Brien added, to rally the base:

“He’s unsophisticated and ignorant and he usually cannot argue things based on fact or he cannot present a strategy or an opposing point of view that is devoid of making fun of someone or taking on someone else’s power within his own constellation of choices.”

Essence Magazine contributor Midwin Charles brought up the “Obama test” to say that Trump has gotten away with so much that Republicans never would have let slide from Barack Obama.

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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