President Donald Trump’s tweetstorm on Thursday was more intense than normal.

See: Trump Today: Trump lashes out at CNN and NBC

The president seemed determined to drive home several points with the Labor Day weekend fast approaching. Given the wide-ranging rants, questions naturally occurred: What forces are at work here? And where is this headed? MarketWatch spoke with several leading political scientists to get their views on the president and his tweets.

Here are their comments, edited for length and clarity:

My guess — and what else could it be? — is that Trump’s tweets are a way of blowing off steam. He’s probably raging around the White House like a caged animal and his Twitter feed is probably his only outlet. We may overthink things when we see these as in some sense the product of his mind or of strategic thinking; rather they are the expressions of rage and frustration, like a child who can’t get his way. The only difference is that he is a big and dangerous child. Maybe the way to think about him is to access the scene near the end of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” when the aging boxer Jake LaMotta is seen battering his head against a prison wall in frustration. That’s the way I think of Trump. — Steven Smith, professor of political science, Yale University

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The tweets have been disruptive to regular order on Capitol Hill. I have over 140 former students who now work on the Hill, and they say it is harder to pursue policy goals. The primary goal is to keep being the most important story out of Washington every day. It’s all about him. It is a mystery what his strategic goals are, other than enhancing his own ego. — James Thurber, professor at political science, American University

Trump and Twitter are the two biggest disrupters in our political system. He’s very similar in tactics to those used by Joseph McCarthy. He’s always changing the subject and making so many claims they are hard to run down. The two main purposes of his tweets are to keep his base fired up and to wiggle out of this scandal. Those seem to be the main topics he tweets about. The striking paradox about Twitter TWTR, +1.62% is that it makes it easier for the average person to check facts and check out people on the other side of an issue, but the pace of Twitter discourages us from doing it. It sort of incentivizes you to react without checking. — Michael Cornfield, associate professor of political management, George Washington University Gradual School of Political Management

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