The screeching of the raccoons in Central Park is more coherent and less feral. They’re merely nervous when my dog approaches. Trump is petrified as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff close in.

“Crazy Nancy,” he said at a recent rally in Dallas, where his epic self-pity and all-consuming grudges took center stage. “Think of that. That crazy Nancy. She is crazy. And shifty Schiff. How about this guy? He makes up my conversation, which was perfect. He makes up my conversation. He sees what I said. It doesn’t play well because it was perfect.” Give the president a thesaurus and a therapist, though not necessarily in that order.

He added: “The do-nothing Democrats have betrayed our country, and that great betrayal is over. We are finally again , and we’ve been doing it now for almost three years.” Doing what? Again how? This wasn’t a speech; it was a puzzle. “Can you believe we’ve been doing this for three years? Can you believe it? I’ve been a politician for three years. I can’t believe that.” Trust me, President Trump. Your incredulity is no match for mine.

It has been the case from the start that Trump communicates like no president before him. That’s principally because he miscommunicates like no president before him. And while his verbal errors and infelicities are largely accidental, they’re hardly incidental.

They’re a semantic complement to his flouting of tradition and junking of norms. They help prevent him from being tagged as one of the elitists he rails against. No snob would spell so sloppily or use capital letters with such abandon. No snob would be so lavish with schoolyard slurs. No snob would thrash and flail his way through sentences the way he does. On Twitter in particular, Trump doesn’t exclaim; he expectorates. You can feel the spittle several time zones away.

And Twitter suits him not just because of its immediacy and reach. It’s a format so abridged and casual that botched grammar isn’t necessarily equated with stupidity; it could simply be the consequence of haste or convenience. Formally written letters follow rules and demand etiquette. For Twitter all you need is a keypad and a spleen.

But Trump seems even more splenetic of late. He raged for nearly 90 minutes in Dallas a week and a half ago. He raged for more than 70 in that wild cabinet meeting on Monday, when he claimed three times in a row, as if stuttering, that being president had cost him between $2 billion and $5 billion; erroneously said that he was the first president to forgo a salary; ridiculously boasted that Miami’s airport might be the world’s busiest (it’s not even in the top 20); dismissed the emoluments clause of the Constitution as “phony”; and careered from one fantasy to the next, covering so much territory with so little truthfulness that media fact checkers devoted long articles to correcting the record.