That's the headline on the NYT website front page. When you click through, it's a little less bad "Trump’s Evolution From Relief to Fury Over the Russia Indictment."

Isn't this fake news? The authors — Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman — do not know how Trump really felt on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. They only know what he chose to say publicly, how he spun it, first when the indictment was announced, and later, after other people had taken their turn spinning it. He could have been happy or angry the whole time or anxious and later coolly amused. You cannot know! Yet Rogers and Haberman* themselves are spinning the story, and at best they are making up what they believe Trump must have felt but more likely, I think, they are bolstering the interpretation of the indictment propounded by Trump's antagonists:

President Trump began the weekend believing that something good had just happened to him... But ... watching TV... [t]he president’s mood began to darken as it became clearer to him that some commentators were portraying the indictment as nothing for him to celebrate, according to three people with knowledge of his reaction.....

I see that there are sources, but even assuming these were good sources, all they seem to have known is that Trump became aware — I can't believe this could have been a surprise — that his antagonists had a way to spin the indictments against him and they were getting a lot of TV time.

What followed was a two-day Twitter tirade that was unusually angry and defiant even by Mr. Trump’s standards. 

We can all read Trump's Twitter feed. I read it over the weekend, and it never crossed my mind that Trump had become "unusually angry" or beset with "fury." He put out some great tweets that pushed back his antagonists and restated his interpretation of the indictments. One tweet struck me as his best ever:

If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!

That's totally on point and completely intelligent. In very few words, he's saying the damage done to America has been mainly the work of Americans doing the chaos the Russians could only have hoped to see. They're laughing at us, and we need to stop doing what must be so damned funny to them.**

I don't know what emotion he felt as he wrote those words, and assertions about his emotions are a bizarre distraction. When someone makes a great point in a debate and your response is "Ooh, you sound so angry!," what are you doing? First, you are trying to make the person angry (or angrier). Second, you're stepping away from the substance of the argument, perhaps because you have no good response. Third, you might really believe that the substance of arguments isn't what really matters. It really is emotion that draws you to one position or another. If X sets forth an interpretation and Y writes an article saying "Ooh, X is so angry!," Y is speaking to the readers and, I assume, hoping they will feel their emotions — fear or hatred of the angry, angry man.

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* Those names... seems like they should write a Broadway musical together....



** Trump is only guessing at how the Russians feel. He can't really know. Maybe they fear American chaos.