Stop waiting for Donald Trump to blow up. The bombastic billionaire isn't going to explode. He's going to shrivel up.
Trump's fatal flaw isn't his oversized ego, but his undersized character.
America can love an irreverent blowhard — even a foul and boorish one like Trump. But a blowhard can't get away with whining and being thin-skinned. Trump is proving himself to be a thin-skinned whiner, rather than the magnanimous braggart whose image he has cultivated.
Trump's appeal is a mystery to much of the press — both the conservative media and the left-leaning mainstream media. Part of it is his hawkish (if deeply inconsistent) rhetoric on immigration, an issue the elites of both parties like to avoid. Part of his appeal comes from his inchoate (but not ultimately wrong) rants against the corruption of Washington politics.
But his unapologetic offensiveness — the very trait the media has been counting on to sink Trump — is also part of his appeal. At every turn, media elites ask him, basically: Won't you publicly apologize for some thing you've said?
That was Megyn Kelly's question to him, specifically about nasty personal things he had said about women. NBC's Chuck Todd asked him if he was allergic to apologizing. Trump's answer to Todd was perfect: "No. I apologize when I'm wrong."
Today, we're supposed to apologize — grovel, even — for nearly everything. Make one bad joke on Twitter, and you're expected to prostrate yourself before the social media mob. The list of forbidden joke topics is expanding toward infinity, as comedians from Jerry Seinfeld to Trevor Noah to Amy Schumer learn daily. Heck, Democratic politician Marty O'Malley even had to apologize for saying "all lives matter."
Even if you don't do anything wrong, you're supposed to apologize for your privilege: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, upper-middle-class privilege. Simply identifying as your actual biological gender counts as "privilege" today.
In this suffocating, absurd, oppressive environment of political correctness, Trump looks like a free and brave man, saying what he wants and refusing to apologize. The people who support him see him as unchained, and they want to be like him.
So his bombast won't bring him down, because it's self-reinforcing. Even the truly foul, vulgar and idiotic things he says (of course, today we use only the less descriptive and more political descriptors such as "offensive") only serve to bolster his image as a pariah in an age of political correctness.
None of that can bring Trump down. What will bring him down is the fact that criticism instantly turns him into a thin-skinned whiner.
His reaction to Megyn Kelly was telling. When confronted with his demeaning and dumb comments about women, Trump didn't simply say, I'm too busy making America great again to worry about your petty speech police. He complained to Kelly about "the way you have treated me." Awwwww. The bombastic reality TV star entering into politics has been criticized by a media figure. Poor baby.
He then spent days on Twitter just complaining about Fox. For example: "Other networks seem to treat me so much better than @FoxNews."
A man who stands behind what he says but apologizes when he's wrong sounds admirable and appealing. Trump doesn't do that. After his weird attacks on John McCain's service in Vietnam and suffering as a POW, Trump gave mealy-mouthed non-credible, quasi-defenses. As Rich Lowry wrote in National Review, "For someone who prides himself on being the bold truth-teller, Trump has a penchant for trying to litigate his way out of his controversial statements."
Trump is willing, at least, to stand up for his whining. "I am a whiner," he said on CNN Tuesday morning, "and I'm a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win."
This rings familiar if you've followed Trump. He's found success by gaming bankruptcy law, failing to repay debts, exploiting his crony connections, whining, and working the refs.
And so the picture of the man comes into focus: Trump is Victor Hugo's Monsieur Thenardier: "We know where the wind is blowing. Money is the stuff we smell. And when we're rich as Croesus, Jesus! Won't we see you all in hell!"
Trump is another sewer rat in American industry. He wants to be another sewer rat of American politics. And he promises to make the U.S. the sewer rat of the world.
The media has waited for Trump to flame out. He may instead simply scurry away. Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
