Jabin Botsford for The Washington Post
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The president of the United States wakes up some mornings seemingly determined to convince as many people as possible that he's unsuited to high office.
Fortunately for him, he has a Twitter account allowing him to act on this impulse immediately and without any filter.
On Wednesday, Trump retweeted three videos from an apparatchik of an extremist party in Britain purporting to show acts of violence by Muslims. One of them is reportedly fake -- it's not clear the perpetrator is a Muslim. He then defended himself in a tweet to UK Prime Minister Theresa May -- or, at least, he tried. He ended up tagging someone else with the same name.
He followed up his video retweets with a message calling for the firing of "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough on the basis of a noxious conspiracy theory.
It's difficult to exaggerate how mind-blowing these tweets are.
Yet Trump's presidency operates on a largely separate track than his Twitter feed and his other off-script interjections and pronouncements. His domestic policy is so conventional that it could've been cooked up by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell -- and, in fact, it was. He's pursued a largely status quo foreign policy, except more cautious than Barack Obama's and, especially, George W. Bush's.
Amid the miasma of manufactured controversies, lurid distractions and conspiracy theories, Trump's presidency is, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said of Wagner's music, "better than it sounds."
A common criticism of Trump is that, via his attacks on offending journalistic outlets and jurists, he's endangering the Constitution. He's certainly violating norms, worth preserving in their own right, of how a president should conduct himself and speak. But if you got news only of Trump's official acts and knew nothing of his ongoing commentary, you'd think a rigorously rules-bound president occupied the White House.
The defining feature of Neil Gorsuch and Trump's other judicial nominees is a firm commitment to interpreting the Constitution and the laws as written. Trump has rolled back Obama administrative actions on immigration, the environment and health care that at best pushed the envelope of executive authority and at worst were frankly unconstitutional.
Just this week, Trump won a court fight confirming that, no matter what his critics might hope, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is indeed an executive agency whose director is to be appointed by the president in the event of a vacancy.
True, Trump is an accidental constitutionalist. Trump's social conservative base demands originalist judges, and his alliance with the Federalist Society produces them.
Meanwhile, Trump's deregulatory reflex and desire to reverse Obama's legacy mean he's clawing back his predecessor's overreach.
On the legislative front, even as Trump outdoes himself with outlandish tweets, he's getting closer to his first major victory, in pursuit of a stereotypical Republican policy goal. If there's a safe assumption to make about any GOP president, it's that he'll seek deficit-financed tax cuts. Trump is reliably conforming to the pattern.
In the real world, the economy is growing at a nice clip, and the stock market is humming along, showing no signs that it believes the republic is about to be destroyed by a Mad King.
None of this is to suggest that Trump's governing and his tweets are entirely distinguishable. Some of the tweets have had consequences and, if nothing else, they are a dismaying window into his state of mind.
The firing of James Comey was a product of the kind of grievance Trump displays on Twitter, and he's going to pay a price for it for a long time. Trump's tweet about Obama wiretapping him drove his supporters down a rabbit hole. Slamming Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake -- potentially decisive votes on the tax bill -- could yet prove very costly.
Trump's missives obsessively attacking CNN have created a pall over the Department of Justice's suit to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger. The specter of the confrontation with North Korea playing out in insults over Twitter is unsettling, to say the least.
But the tweets don't constitute the sum total of the administration. It's possible Trump sees Twitter -- and his other provocations -- as a way to stir the pot, entertain himself, stoke his base, flog his enemies and vent his frustrations separate and distinct from decisions of government, undertaken under the influence of, by and large, impressive, well-meaning advisers.
Trump's presidency is much better than his Twitter feed. Although he stands ready and willing to convince you otherwise, 280 characters at a time.
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