On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) stated President Trump’s tweet about Iran is an attempt to distract from the president’s performance in Europe and said, “This is wag the dog time in Washington, DC.”

Connolly said, “Well, if the past is prologue, we know that he had engaged in this kind of bluff, this kind of threat with North Korea, and it meant very little. And in fact, we went from threatening ‘fire and fury’ to calling Kim Jong-un an ‘honorable’ man. That’s quite a leap. So, I don’t know that on the international stage he has a lot of credibility, even when he caps everything. But I think more importantly, Wolf, this is a classic Trump strategy and distraction. He wants to get the topic off the catastrophic meeting he had in Helsinki, and the two bad meetings before that in the United Kingdom with Theresa May and with our allies at NATO. And so –, but Russia just dominated the conversation for the whole week, and he was hurting. So, let’s distract with a new topic. And in this case, it’s Iran. Let’s find a new foil that maybe all of us will focus on, and we’ll forget that there was a summit in Helsinki last week.”

He added, “This is wag the dog time in Washington, DC. And it’s kind of a crude attempt, frankly.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett