Thursday, September 24, 2015

A great takedown of Trump by Charles Cooke

I bet this was really fun to write:


In the last month alone, Trump has threatened to sue a small-time T-shirt maker whose products bear critical slogans (“Donald Is Dumb,” “Stop Trump,” and “America Is Already Great”); he has attempted to begin legal proceedings against the Club for Growth on the grounds that it has had the temerity to oppose him and his policies (this, Trump says, is “defamation” — a stunted and preposterous piece of legal analysis that lends some credibility to the messages on the aforementioned t-shirts); and he has expressed a desire to use the federal government to censor unpliable journalists for the high crime of being amusing on television. That neither lawsuit has a shot in hell — and, indeed, that the FCC doesn’t actually have any jurisdiction over cable news — does not seem to matter much. What matters is that Donald Trump feels hurt, and that he doesn’t like it one bit.
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That it might be unwise to give nuclear weapons to a man who routinely seeks revenge against even the most modest of quibblers seems not to have occurred to the 25 percent or so of the Republican primary voters who are at present sitting on Trump’s bandwagon. For the rest of us, though, I shall make the point clear: This is not a person who should be given access to a military — or even, for that matter, to a modest bully pulpit. Among the media figures that Trump has thus far called upon to be fired are Lowry (for suggesting that Carly cut him down to size in the testicles department), Jonah Goldberg (for proposing that he “behaves like a “14-year-old girl”), Stephen Hayes (for noting correctly that he is not a conservative), George Will (for arguing that he is a fraud), Charles Krauthammer (for discussing his unpopularity), Chuck Todd (for implying that he isn’t a serious person), Megyn Kelly (for . . . asking questions), and Hugh Hewitt (for the same offense). When maligned, Abraham Lincoln picked up his pen or arranged a debate. Donald Trump takes immediately to Twitter and shouts, “take him off the air!”

Why does Trump behave this way? Because he’s a preposterous little trust-fund wuss, that’s why. As was illustrated once again last night, the man is not really a “fighter” or an “alpha male” or an iron-cored “enemy of political correctness.” He’s a thin-skinned performance artist whose peculiar shtick falls to pieces the moment someone useful elects to return a punch. Look through Trump’s recent Twitter contributions and you will see a wounded man who is always a few harsh phrases and a modicum of bad publicity away from curling up in an oversized sweater and listening to “Everybody Hurts” on repeat.

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