Why President Trump Still Bashes John McCain

Trump is back to insulting John McCain. It’s not entirely clear why; I’ve seen it suggested that the president saw a “Saturday Night Live” rerun that got him going again. Maybe it was something else. Whatever the immediate cause, at this point everyone agrees that Trump is only hurting himself by insulting the late Arizona senator and war hero.

Almost everyone, anyway. Some pundits still fall for what I’ve called the #cleverfallacy – the mistake of inventing some brilliant logic to explain Trump’s seemingly irrational actions. There’s a powerful impulse to make this error. We like to attribute rationality to other people’s decisions, for one thing, and those who make this mistake are usually quite clever themselves and good at thinking up complicated political strategies.

And yet the best explanation for most of Trump’s actions, and certainly for the most obviously self-destructive ones, is that there’s nothing strategic going on; he’s acting on instinct. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O'Brien points out, insulting people in public is just what Donald Trump does. What he’s always done.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-trump-attacking-mccain-is-a-way-to-appeal-to-his-political-base/2019/03/21/ccb4c856-4bdd-11e9-8cfc-2c5d0999c21e_story.html?utm_term=.c703f79fdfce