Donald Trump hits the panic button

Earlier today, Donald Trump stood in front of reporters on the White House lawn and made threats against China unless it was willing to help him smear Joe Biden. Then Trump asked Ukraine to help him smear Joe Biden, thus publicly confessing to what he’s accused of in the whistleblower report.

In a sign that perhaps Donald Trump and/or his social media handlers were unsure of what to do with this, Trump confusingly tweeted “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” at around 3:30pm today. No one was quite sure if this was supposed to be a confession letter, or if he was randomly accusing someone else of election interference. Then things got weirder.

Just now, Donald Trump tweeted “There wasn’t ANYTHING said wrong in my conversation with the Ukrainian President. This is a Democrat Scam!” Wait a minute here. This morning his strategy was to publicly confess in front of the television cameras. Now this afternoon he appears to be reversing strategy, tweeting that he didn’t do it. That’s not going to help him any, considering more people are going to see the tape of his White House lawn confession than the tweet where he tries to take it all back.

This also leads to other questions. Donald Trump’s strategy today has shifted from confessing his election interference to the cameras, to an all-caps tweet about election interference that no one understood, to now insisting that he didn’t engage in election interference. Is this a matter of Trump flip flopping? Or are Trump’s advisers using his Twitter account to push conflicting strategies as the whole thing becomes even more chaotic?