To hear fans of Donald Trump tell it, they love and follow him because he is fearless, and says things no one else wants to say. As one told Bloomberg news,”he has the balls to stand up to the career politicians.”
But he does not have the balls to stand up to the slightest criticism. It gives him the vapors, and he starts to wail like a child who’s lost his new toy.
“Their questions to me were much tougher than to other people,” he whined to Byron York, among others, after the debate last Thursday. “It was an unfair question. … They didn’t ask those questions of everybody else.” (They didn’t ask “those questions” because no one else had threatened to run on a third party ticket, and no one else was on record as having called women fat pigs.)
On Twitter that night, he called Megyn Kelly a “bimbo,” and pollster Frank Luntz a “slob,” but when it came to himself he adopted the voice of a Jane Austen heroine.”I thought the questions were not nice,” he said. “I didn’t think they were appropriate and I think Megyn behaved badly.”
How cruel. As Mary Katherine Ham of Hot Air noted, “Trump supporters are busy on Twitter asserting that Trump calling people disgusting animals is brave truth-telling, but Megyn Kelly asking about it is unprofessional and crass.”
By this time the chasm between the abuse Trump routinely showered on everyone and the extreme delicacy with which he and his friends insist he be treated had begun to strike a great many people as strange.
An editorial in National Review noted that he could still run on a third-party ticket, “whining about the unfairness of his treatment … which might undermine his self-presentation as a winner who has glided from success to success.”
“What’s up with the whining?” asks Jonah Goldberg.”All I ever hear from Trump supporters is how he “fights” and “he doesn’t back down.” On Special Report, Charles Krauthammer added, “This is a guy running as a tough guy … Now he says that he was treated not nicely by three Fox News Anchors. It doesn’t fit.”
What’s up with the whining is that Trump has handed the GOP the silver bullet that it was seeking and never quite landed: Calling him evil, perverse, and a sinister malady only stoked his mystique as a potent disturber. But this time it’s different: How can he be strong when he whimpers in public? How can he face down Putin (or Iran, or the Islamic State) when he cries when a girl hits him?
This goes for Trump and for his supporters, who had a fainting fit Friday and rushed to console him, give him a cookie, and dry off his tears. But how long will they stay with somebody mocked as a sissy, who throws punches from a safe distance but collapses like a rag doll when punches hit him?
Now is the time to break out the s-word, and give it a spin, along with Trumanesque spiels about kitchens and those who melt in them. “Bullies are cowards,” says Ron Fournier, correctly. There is no better example of this than Trump, who is now spewing rants and self-pity on four different networks — but not FOX News, which he brands as a traitor for applying its usual standards to him.
“I’m a big girl; I can take it,” said Kelly on Sunday, after being treated to fresh bursts of truculent bluster. But Trump’s not a big boy, and he can’t.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
