Donald Trump's strange, startling weekend on Twitter

(CNN)It was a rainy, damp weekend in Washington. Not good golf weather. But very, very good weather to sit in your house and tweet. Which is exactly what it appears President Donald Trump did.

Between Saturday morning and Monday morning, Trump sent nearly three dozen original tweets. And that doesn't include the 62 retweets (including multiple retweets of his own tweets from a day or two earlier) Trump made in the space of less than an hour on Saturday morning. 

 

The bulk of Trump's tweets were focused either on special counsel Robert Mueller's now-concluded investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election (15 tweets) or the ongoing trade war with China (eight tweets). Trump also sent three tweets blasting the idea that his administration's refusal to cooperate with ongoing oversight investigations by Congress amounted to a constitutional crisis.

He also repeatedly quote-tweeted Lou Dobbs or guests on the Fox Business personality's show. He suggested that the Boston Red Sox, who visited the White House last week, were on a winning streak because they came to see him. He attacked Minnesota Rep. Rashida Tlaib as possessing a "tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people." He praised the ratings for the overtly pro-Trump "Fox & Friends" and the similarly advocate-y One America News Network. He even suggested that he won the 2016 election because he refused to release his tax returns!

It was a tour de force -- except not in a good way.

As anyone who has been paying attention since Trump became a candidate knows, his Twitter feed is rightly understood as a direct window into a) what the President is thinking about and b) what he really cares about at any given moment. The public has never had access to the internal deliberations and machinations of a chief executive like Twitter has provided us with Trump. And it's hard to imagine we will ever have something -- or someone -- like this again.

All of which is to say that doing a forensic analysis of Trump's tweets is a hugely important -- and enlightening -- activity.

What this weekend reveals is that, for all of the desire from White House aides and congressional Republicans for Trump to move on from the Russia probe, he remains uniquely focused on it. Trump sent twice as many tweets about the Russia probe -- and the claim that it's actually Democrats who need to be investigated for "spying" on him during the 2016 election. Here's just one example from Sunday:

"Despite two years and millions of dollars spent, the Democrats are acting like crazed lunatics ever since the results of the Mueller Report were made public. But they knew there was NOTHING even before the Report was started. It is all a big Hoax, the biggest in American history!"

See More