RECENT exposés of Donald Trump’s administration have raised familiar questions about the president’s mental state. In his chronicle “Fear”, Bob Woodward quotes Reince Priebus saying of his former boss: “The president has zero psychological ability to recognise empathy or pity in any way.” On September 13th Mr Trump provided an illustration of this infinitely more troubling than the rough treatment he meted out to Mr Priebus.

He tweeted this:

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000...

Thus, the president demonstrated, yet again, that against all odds he retains the capacity to shock.

He was responding to a recent report by epidemiologists at George Washington University into the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, which ravaged the island a year ago this month. Based on the excess mortality observed after the storm, the researchers estimated that it had claimed between 2,658 and 3,290 lives.

This was, though inevitably controversial, given the assumptions involved in such an approach, both statistically rigorous and perfectly plausible. Maria knocked out Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, mobile-phone towers and damaged or levelled 470,000 houses. Outlying towns and villages were inaccessible by road for weeks. Old people were reported to have suffocated to death after their hospital respirators cut out. It had always been clear that the death toll was far higher than the handful of deaths, due to drowning and flying debris, observed during the storm. Those are the numbers Mr Trump refers to in his tweet, though they, too, were later revised upwards, to 64 deaths.

Presented with rigorous analysis to suggest Maria was the deadliest hurricane to affect America for 118 years, a normally empathetic president might have been expected to express sorrow. He might even express a modicum of contrition. Puerto Rico’s island state and chronic infrastructure, run down by decades of malgovernance, were major factors in its disaster. But so was the well-documented inadequacy of the federal government’s response. Being profoundly abnormal, in his narcissism and paranoia, Mr Trump has instead chosen to understand the epidemiologists' report as nothing but a conspiracy to make him look bad.

He knew who to blame for that, too. In a follow-up tweet, the president blathered:

.....This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

Ignore, for a moment, the stunning moral failure that is an American president seeking to dismiss the death, suffering and bereavement of many thousands of American citizens as a political stunt cooked up by his enemies. It may take an effort, but try. Focus instead on Mr Trump’s notion of good and bad politics.

The Senate race in Florida, between Bill Nelson and his Republican challenger, Rick Scott, is shaping up to be the fiercest, and perhaps most important, of the mid-terms. The contest is desperately tight and, given the state of races elsewhere, could determine which party controls the Senate. There are a million Puerto Rican voters in Florida. Around 50,000 have settled there since Maria. Mr Nelson’s campaign has so far found it harder to woo them than had been expected. Mr Trump’s tweets should help.

“I disagree with @POTUS—an independent study said thousands were lost,” tweeted Mr Scott in response.