Early last week someone I was talking with flashed back to Trump’s campaign and asked me: “How is it<br />that he wasn’t ruined when he mocked John McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war?”<br />“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.<br />If you became too transfixed by his laughable boast<br />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.<br />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<br />that there were all sorts of holocausts and the nuclear variety wasn’t really so bad.<br />Such a self-serving hallucination about the Electoral College would have been the takeaway<br />from any other president’s news conference — good for a solid week of media mastication.<br />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,<br />and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.<br />Trump whined that he had been promised a nicer, simpler question, then said, with customary self-congratulation<br />and hyperbole, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.”<br />“I hate the charge,” he added.
