PRESIDENT TROLL IS LOSING HIS TOUCH

Is there any reason to talk about the tweet the president posted this morning?

Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2017

Trump sent this fact-challenged tweet a few hours before meeting with the man behind the hacks of both Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. (Trump conflated the two hacks.) The president might have been riffing on recent articles in the right-wing press that were presumably fed to him by his staff (e.g., "Republicans Want Answers from Private Firm with Access to Hacked DNC Server," from the New York Post yesterday). He was surely trying to shift blame for the hacks away from Vladimir Putin and his own campaign -- hey, it's Podesta who has something to hide!

But while there's been some media buzz about this tweet, it's not going to be the multi-day five-alarm media fire that Trump's CNN bodyslam tweet was. Right now we're much more interested in the actual goings-on at the G20. We want to know what Trump and Putin talked about for two hours plus. If Trump really is the Great Distractor, he failed this time.

The CNN tweet touched on the issue of political violence, which interests us and scares a lot of us. That tweet was about the media, which likes to report on itself. And the tweet cast Trump as a hero, which infuriates much of America and delights the rest. So well done, Dan Scavino, or whoever decided to remix the video and post it -- if Senate Republicans had any governing skills, they could have finalized and passed a truly horrible health care bill under a distraction smokescreen that thick.

Today's tweet, by contrast, was ... kind of boring. Oh, sure, right-wing America knows who John Podesta is -- most righties these days literally believe he molests boys in pizzerias -- but the rest of America, apart from politics junkies, has no idea who the hell he is. Trump isn't doing any chest-thumping in the tweet. And it doesn't really touch on anything that's been in the headlines this week. (CNN was in the headlines for some inaccurate reporting before the bodyslam tweet).

Hy, Mr. President, you're losing your troll touch --or maybe you're mediocre at this without staffers to help you out.