Op-Ed: Another day, another vulgar Trump tweet. The president clearly isn’t learning on the job

President Trump issued the following statement on Twitter this morning under a subtitle reading “45th President of the United States�:

“I heard poorly rated @MorningJoe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!�

For those who haven’t followed Trump’s feuds, the tweet was a reference to Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, co-hosts of an MSNBC morning show — once Trump fans, now Trump critics. And it revealed — or, more properly, reaffirmed — what kind of man this president is.

Note the gratuitous cruelty, which Brzezinski presumably earned by daring to criticize Trump’s policies. Note the scarcely veiled misogyny; Brzezinski is no dummy, but to Trump, she’s just another low-IQ blonde.

Note, above all, the self-absorption. Doesn’t the president of the United States have more important things to think about than the chatter on a morning show?

Apparently not.

This is, alas, the same Trump who mocked Republican campaign rivals with childish insults, who raged over crowd estimates on Inauguration Day and who made his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings.

When this president rises every morning, he doesn’t think first about making America great again or helping the struggling voters who put him into office. He thinks mostly about himself.

And then he tweets, his self-obsession untempered by self-restraint.

As Sen. Ben Sasse, a conservative Republican from Nebraska, tweeted in response: “Please just stop. This isn’t normal, and it’s beneath the dignity of your office.�

None of this is new, of course. But that’s the problem: Five months into the Trump presidency, it isn’t getting any better.

Last November, 63 million voters gave Trump a chance to grow into the office he won. Many of his supporters said just that: They didn’t like everything about him, but they hoped the White House would make him a better man. Unfortunately, he hasn’t seized that opportunity. Instead, he seems intent on proving that he’s either unable or unwilling to grow.

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