Naval War College prof explains how Trump's 'stress' tweets are a roadmap for America's enemies

Of the many revelations from former acting Attorney General Sally Yates' Senate hearing on May 8, Naval War College professor Tom Nichols said in a series of tweets that President Donald Trump's response might have been the most interesting.

The 14-tweet-long thread begins with Nichols explaining his background as a "Sovietologist", and how he "would have given anything for Andropov or Gorbachev to give me a running narrative of their mood and inner thoughts in real time" the way Trump appears to have done with his tweets about Yates following her testimony.

He went on to say that the president's Twitter feed "is basically a raw feed of POTUS thoughts to foreign analysts" because they are "pieces of the president's moods and thoughts that day".

"This only occurred to me today as I realized how easily POTUS tweets were giving me a minute by minute image of his reactions to Yates," Nichols tweeted, and then added "this is the kind of instant leadership portrait that I wouldn't want a foreign nation to have when gaming out a crisis with us."

"It is, from a foreign intel analyst's viewpoint, in some ways probably more valuable than classified memos," Nichols tweeted. "It's real and instant."

He said Trump's tweets broadcast "how the President reacts under stress," which is "something you never want the enemy to know". Nevertheless, Nichols tweeted, "it's all out there, every day".

After an aside about "how the President processes information" and how valuable that kind of information can be, he completed the thread by saying that while it's not his place to "tell the President how to communicate," he finds "hugely dangerous in revealing real-time POTUS reactions".

Read Nichols' entire thread below.