To be fair to the president, there is one thing his Twitter account is good for, and that is temporary distraction.

As noted last week, the president is facing a lot of imminent and difficult policy choices: North Korea, tax reform, disaster relief in Puerto Rico, and eventually, the debt ceiling and the budget. There are also additional political challenges: bad poll numbers, the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, the possibility of a Trump-endorsed candidate losing a GOP Senate primary, etc.

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Increasingly, however, Trump’s bloody-minded jihad against the NFL must be seen as an attempt to distract from something far more dangerous to Trump: the malfeasance of his Cabinet and White House staff.

Trump loves to recall his presidential campaign, so he should remember that he campaigned on two themes: draining the swamp and Hillary Clinton’s sense of entitlement. His administration was ostensibly going to be above the cozy perquisites of power of previous administrations. Team Trump would swear off the arbitrary application of rules to others but not to themselves. Trump’s inaugural address blasted how “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” and declared: “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

Let’s just review how this populist project has been going in the past two weeks:

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So, to sum up: Trump’s Cabinet officers sure seem to be enjoying the perquisites of power, and the Trump White House thinks that the rules do not apply to them in the same way they claimed the rules did not apply to the Clintons.

Writing in the Atlantic, David Graham beat me to the punch enunciated a theme that seems increasingly clear about the Trump administration:

Trump’s aides and advisers seem to have come to believe that the force-field of gravity distortion that protects the president will apply to them too. Whether they are right is less clear…. common knock on the Clintons was that they behaved as though the rules did not apply to them. Already, some members of Trump’s inner circle are acting the same way. Feeling immune to ordinary strictures can be alluring, but as Hillary Clinton learned, sometimes you only discover too late that it’s an illusion.

During the transition there were fierce debates among journalists about how to cover Trump’s Twitter feed. Politico’s Jack Shafer argued that it was a massive misdirection engine from real stories. Others argued that it would be inappropriate to ignore them. Eight months into his administration, I think the epiphany should be obvious to everyone. Sure, maybe Trump is trying to pick and choose Twitter fights that he thinks he can win. However, there is too much malfeasance and incompetency to deflect.