And yet the Trump of two years ago was different—to a degree. He was provocative and insulting and fact-challenged, of course, but to a much lesser extent than he is today. Then and now, he was boastful and braggadocious. He picked fights. But there was much less of that behavior over all—the Trump Twitter archive records two hundred and eighty-seven Trump tweets and retweets in August, 2017, compared to six hundred and eighty in August, 2019—and the volume seems to have been turned up along with the frequency. Today’s Trump is not just more prone to misspeaking and stumbling, he is also more overtly confrontational more of the time, more immersed in a daily cycle of Presidential punditry, and more casually incendiary with his words and sentiments.

Is he finding it harder to break through? Does he simply have fewer meetings on his schedule and more free time? Maybe it is all of the above. Trump has such little confidence in his third and current chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, that he’s still not removed Mulvaney’s title of “acting” White House boss, more than eight months into his tenure. It’s also true that the outrage cycle that his Presidency has become requires more fuel than it did two years ago, when the wacky pronouncements and shrill insults emanating directly from the Oval Office were still seen as a shocking novelty. Sure enough, the anger and abuse have dramatically and notably increased. Two years ago, Trump used his feed to criticize, belittle, or humiliate specific targets fourteen times in the month of August. (Interestingly, many were Republican senators who were still offering him resistance, including “publicity-seeking Lindsey Graham,” who is now one of his most faithful public promoters, and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, whom Trump disparaged as a “loser.”) In August of this year, the number shot up: the President made or shared fifty-two direct insults on his Twitter feed, by my count. Many were aimed at individual members of the media—from “Crazy Lawrence O’Donnell,” of MSNBC, to “Lunatic” Chris Cuomo, of CNN, to “Psycho” Mika Brzezinski, of MSNBC, and “pathetic” Juan Williams, of Fox. Other targets who were singled out included “the Three Stooges running against me in the G.O.P. primary”; Denmark; NATO; the euro; “car company executives”; “Sleepy Joe Biden” (August 10th: “Does anybody really believe he is mentally fit to be President?”); Beto O’Rourke; liberal Hollywood, “the true racists”; the “anti-Semite” Representative Rashida Tlaib; the “nut job” Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump White House communications director who finally broke with his former boss last month; and, in a retweet to start off the month, “the nipple-height mayor of Londonistan.”