IT was the tweet from hell and by some distance the worst communication an elected leader has published in a long time.

In a week when pole-dancer turned tech guru Jennifer Arcuri appeared live in the court of Piers Morgan, Extinction Rebellion protesters occupied large swathes of Westminster and Coleen Rooney went to war with a rival WAG, the self-styled leader of the free world Donald John Trump cut through all the white noise to display his unique brand of uncaring narcissism.

At 4.38pm on Tuesday, Trump unleashed the following missive on the world: “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over... the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!”

Many thousands of people – even those sensitive to the politics of mental health –recommended the funny farm, while others posted the lyrics of the old 1966 novelty record They’re Coming To Take Me Away Ha-Haaaa. Even by Donald Trump’s reckless diplomacy, his tweet underlined his dangerous attitude to fragile international issues.

Lurking within Trump’s many conceits were the words “in my great and unmatched wisdom”, a line of such Napoleonic delusion that you might be forgiven for rushing to diagnosis.

The National:

As the tweet went viral, American troops were already withdrawing from positions in northern Syria, paving the way for a Turkish operation against Kurdish fighters in the border regions and risking the full-scale slaughter of decent people. The Kurds, who were so vital to the destruction of ISIS, have been abandoned to a fate that will bring even greater repression to the region.

Paradoxically, Trump’s tweet said as much about the medium as it did about his crass grasp of world affairs. More importantly, it should act as a hall of mirrors on our own lives and the stress we place on our own mental health in pursuit of social media.

I am a fan of Twitter’s immediacy but loathe to the very bottom of my soul the way that it reduces everything to overstatement, parody and glib reductionism. No one – and certainly not Twitter – has ever claimed it was the best medium for resolving global affairs, but Trump’s unhinged tweet is a reminder of how instant reaction and superficial commentary can worsen already complex issues.

This was an unusual moment in presidential communication. The Senator for Virginia Mark Warner retaliated, saying: “The Syrian Kurds stood with the United States in the fight against ISIS, and this President just betrayed them in a tweet.” Then, in a moment of Twitter sharp practice, someone dug up a tweet from Ivanka Trump’s account: “Thank you Prime Minister Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of Trump Towers, Istanbul.” It was a masterstroke of asynchronous politics implying that Trump was pursuing personal gain.

If betrayal and military adventurism were not enough, Ivanka seemed to throw a bottle of meths on to the brazier, deepening suspicion about the Trump family’s private financial affairs and the corruption that rots away at the centre of presidential power. Even Trump’s die-hard allies in the media were caught out. His favourite news show, Fox And Friends, struggled to rationalise the policy reversal that exposed the Kurds in Northern Syria to attack from Turkey. In years to come this car-crash of tweets will form the basis of books on statecraft, PhD dissertations and history documentaries.

The Trump presidency is a social-media crime-scene and each new clue is dragging him closer to impeachment. Like an episode of Colombo, it will be his own narcissism that will eventually bring him down.

Twitter has created a new form of media with a fragmentary communication system best described as ‘rapid-fire overload’. As our timelines cascade and update, we are offered shards of and at times irreconcilable glimpses into different worlds.

FOR an hour, I was taken through the horrors awaiting the embattled Kurds as they hope for a safe homeland, the endless photo-stream of the AUOB march in Edinburgh, a truly bizarre sectarian wedding in Northern Ireland where the bride, resplendent in a tight-fitting matrimonial dress, led a Sash-Bash of songs better suited to the back alleys of Sandy Row than her special day. Then, out of nowhere, an expose by the Daily Record’s new political editor, Paul Hutcheon, revealing the Provost of Glasgow’s predilection for shoes.

According to the Esquire writer Luke O’Neill, this rapid-fire overload is “like a series of quick concussive blows to the head, where everything is flattened into a grey gruel of information, and nothing stands out”.

The relentless flow and the sudden shifts of tone go from the sacred to the profane, from the ridiculous to the profoundly important and from the tragic to the humorous.

I am not convinced that the human mind was engineered to deal with such random and disruptive mood changes in such a short space of time.

You often hear of people who have abandoned Twitter believing they are being bullied or humiliated, but how many more feel exhausted by its shifts of moods from parody to pathos and from nostalgia to hatred?

Is there a neurologist out there who is seriously studying the impact of social media’s sudden narrative and emotional shifts? It turns out that surprisingly little has been written about the emotional helter-skelter of our Twitter feeds, and Trump is not alone in risking his sanity.

One of the few academics to study the psychological impact of mood-shifts is Joanne Cantor, professor emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She claims: “If you have different contrasting emotions, one after the other, you become desensitized to experiencing any one of them fully.

“You could have the horror of the latest shooting, then watch the cute little kitties, then see a social justice issue that makes you feel terrible. Our brain was not designed, nor did it evolve, to experience so many things quickly in a row.”

This is a troubling thought which has been marginalised to the edges of social media research, dwarfed by concerns about trolls, bullying and fake news.

As we give into its “rapid-fire updates”, it is worth remembering that Twitter has problems differentiating between minor misdemeanours, mild outrage and catastrophic global events. It reduces all of them to compact size and scrolling irrelevance.

Whether it is Trump’s bewildering betrayal of the Kurds or a bride crucifying Tina Turner’s Simply The Best, Twitter exposes them to brief outrage and we all move on. It is not a healthy state of affairs and often makes me yearn for the longer articles of the now quaint Sunday papers.

As the designer and cultural critic Mike Monteiro once said: “Twitter works like a giant depressed brain. It can’t tell right from wrong, and it can’t tell big from small. It needs help.”

So too does the President of the United States of America.