In life, if people criticize you, you are allowed to respond, sometimes acerbically.

If in those responses you consistently seek to completely marginalize the source, always, then you are a total asshole.

I’m not saying that you can never say, “so-and-so is always full of shit,” because sometimes it’s true.

I’m saying that this is your go-to-response whenever anybody has anything bad to say about you, always, the problem is you.

As it happens, this is Donald Trump’s go-to behavior.

Let us say that a given comedian makes a Donald Trump crack. Trump’s response is consistently that the comedian is not funny, has never been funny, that everybody knows he’s not funny, that his career is on the rocks, and that he’s a total loser.

Let us say that a given newspaper has something bad to say about him. Donald Trump’s response is that the newspaper is the worst newspaper in the history of journalism, that it’ll be out of business in a year, and that everybody involved with reporting for it is a total loser.

He often follows the rule of three in these pronouncements; i.e., the source of the complaint needs to be dismissed in three ways, as when Garry Trudeau was making fun of him and Trump declared that Doonesbury wasn’t funny, that he never understood what Garry Trudeau was going on about, and that only phonies pretended otherwise. Three things.

Sometimes the third thing is tangential. If some woman has something bad to say about Trump, Trump must say that she’s crazy, that she’s a loser, and third that she’s fat. Put the sexism aside, and note that while being crazy and being a loser are things that impact your plausibility as a pundit, at least if you’re not a Republican, being fat does not.

Another thing Trump always says is, “Everybody knows it,” after making such pronouncements with premises that originated with him. To wit: let us say that THE WASHINGTON POST fact-checks him. Trump will bloviate that THE WASHINGTON POST is a paper that hasn’t gotten the facts right in fifty years, that it does nothing but lie, and “everybody knows it.” He is fond of saying this about expert testimony. The drought in California is just the fiction of alarmists seeking to destroy the state out of sheer meanness, and “everybody knows it.” No, it’s shit you just made up off the top of your knob, just now.

I have a friend, a well-known writer, and you can probably guess who, who is known for his cantankerous behavior and sometimes fiery temper. You know what he said when a certain other well-known writer declared that she didn’t like him, citing his manner? He acknowledged that his manner is what it is, regretted that such a talented person was not going to be his friend, and shrugged. “Not everybody’s going to like me.” Were he like Trump, he would have said, “She’s a terrible writer anyway. Everybody hates her books. Her career’s in ruins, and everybody knows it. Besides, she’s fat.” This would, however, be a totally clueless and classless thing to do, as well as megalomaniacal, and he is none of the above, not at least in that particular way. Trump, however, has this thing going on where anybody who has anything bad to say about him must be a “total loser” on the brink of total ruin, and that “everybody knows it.”

It’s as if he cannot get through his day without forging a fresh reality for every slight.

And seriously, that is the act of a loser.

As I still firmly believe we’re going to see confirmed.

Tags: Assholes, Donald Trump, Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics