Early last week someone I was talking with flashed back to Trump’s campaign and asked me: “How is it
that he wasn’t ruined when he mocked John McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war?”
“How is it that he wasn’t ruined when he suggested that gun-loving Hillary haters might think about putting a bullet in her?” I said.
If you became too transfixed by his laughable boast
that his administration was operating like “a fine-tuned machine” — an assertion he made twice, for emphasis — you paid inadequate attention to his utterly fictitious claim that he’d done better in the Electoral College than any president since Ronald Reagan.
Or like his statement that a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other,” as if this were some profound epiphany and he needed to share it with the many unsuspecting Americans who thought
that there were all sorts of holocausts and the nuclear variety wasn’t really so bad.
Such a self-serving hallucination about the Electoral College would have been the takeaway
from any other president’s news conference — good for a solid week of media mastication.
Not by accident did he put on that 77-minute performance for the media — hurling insults, flinging lies, marinating in self-pity, luxuriating in self-love — just three days after the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn,
and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.
Trump whined that he had been promised a nicer, simpler question, then said, with customary self-congratulation
and hyperbole, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.”
“I hate the charge,” he added.
