What did Donald Trump do today?

Even by Trump standards, today's Twitter tantrum was a doozy. In eight tweets, most of them pecked out over the course of a mid-morning hour, Trump said this:

Things are really getting ridiculous. The Failing and Crooked (but not as Crooked as Hillary Clinton) @nytimes has done a long & boring story indicating that the World’s most expensive Witch Hunt has found nothing on Russia & me so now they are looking at the rest of the World!....At what point does this soon to be $20,000,000 Witch Hunt, composed of 13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years, STOP! They have found no Collussion with Russia, No Obstruction, but they aren’t looking at the corruption......in the Hillary Clinton Campaign where she deleted 33,000 Emails, got $145,000,000 while Secretary of State, paid McCabes wife $700,000 (and got off the FBI hook along with Terry M) and so much more. Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this Scam. Now that the Witch Hunt has given up on Russia and is looking at the rest of the World, they should easily be able to take it into the Mid-Term Elections where they can put some hurt on the Republican Party. Don’t worry about Dems FISA Abuse, missing Emails or Fraudulent Dossier! What ever happened to the Server, at the center of so much Corruption, that the Democratic National Committee REFUSED to hand over to the hard charging (except in the case of Democrats) FBI? They broke into homes & offices early in the morning, but were afraid to take the Server? ....and why hasn’t the Podesta brother been charged and arrested, like others, after being forced to close down his very large and successful firm? Is it because he is a VERY well connected Democrat working in the Swamp of Washington, D.C.? The Witch Hunt finds no Collusion with Russia - so now they’re looking at the rest of the World. Oh’ great! I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

Most of the above is fictional, and fact-checkers across the internet were kept busy today trying to dissect the purely imaginary from the merely false.

Especially when he is in full-blown conspiracy mode, ranting about dark plots against him only he can perceive, it can often be difficult to tell whether Trump is lying to his supporters for political reasons, or to himself for therapeutic purposes. But the root cause of today's outburst seems to be his anger at the exposure of yet another meeting that his son, Donald Trump Jr., took with foreign agents anxious to ally themselves with the Trump campaign in violation of U.S. law. The "long & boring" New York Times article he referenced detailed the Trump campaign's eagerness to cooperate with representatives of the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a former Israeli intelligence operative with a plan to use fake Facebook accounts to influence American voters.

Why should I care about this?

• The president's job is to uphold the rule of law, not try to put himself above it.

• As a rule, innocent people defend themselves on the facts, not by trying to undermine the basic concept of a criminal investigation.

• It's very, very bad if the President of the United States doesn't really seem to be fully in control of himself.