Why can’t Trump accept his victory and grow up?

Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters and harshest critics wish he would abandon his Twitter account. So do many journalists, who have quite enough to do covering a presidential succession without pausing to parse random 140-character, deliberately ambiguous midnight ramblings.

But that would deprive citizens of continuous insight into the pubescent psyche of their president-elect.

Without the daily barrage of red herrings and disingenuousness, we would not know, for instance, that the soon-to-be leader of the free world spent time and attention last week:

▪  Checking out the ratings of the new version of his old “Celebrity Apprentice” television show and stroking his ego by telling us that successor-host Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t doing as well as Trump did. Adding, “But who cares, he supported Kasich and Hillary.”

▪  Discovering that teenage singer Jackie Evancho’s album sales “skyrocketed,” Trump tweeted, after she announced that she would sing at his inauguration. Her new Christmas album sales increased a bit over the holidays.

▪  Reprising his “Crooked Hillary” campaign trope to again berate “the crooked media” and calling Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., “head clown” of congressional Democrats.

A more mature personality would accept that the campaign is over, the presidency – whether or not he actually wanted it – is his, and get on with the job. But his hunger for approval and his need to be the center of attention are so overwhelming that they override the sobering reality that he is about to become president of the United States.

The way he dealt with the intelligence community’s investigation into Russian intervention in the election was unpresidential, irrational and immature. From the moment in October that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that Russia was hacking sensitive campaign computer files, Trump tweeted his outrage – not at the Russians but at the U.S. intelligence community.

After the election, it was clear that his primary concern was avoiding any suggestion that Russia helped him win. For Trump, that always means sharply attacking the source of any unwanted notions, in this case the security agencies and employes, denigrating their professionalism and suggesting bad motives.

Last week, he received a classified briefing that included all the specific and damning evidence the agencies had gathered. That same day, a heavily redacted public version was released. (It’s available many places online.) Even the limited public version should outrage and concern any rational American, but Trump’s first response – not a Twitter but a written release – was dismissive, and its third sentence emphasized, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Three problems with the rush to fit the facts into Trump’s psychic needs:

▪  The intensity and clear intent of the Russian effort to help Trump was glossed over.

▪  Whether it made a difference in the outcome isn’t the point; they tried.

▪  The intelligence people specifically declined – in the report and in congressional testimony – to assess the impact on the election, saying , properly, that’s not their job. The statement’s implication that they did so was a lie.

Alas, the very next morning we learned from a Trump tweet that nothing about his man-crush on Russian President Vladimir Putin was changed by the report.

“Only ‘stupid’ people, or fools, would think” that having a good relationship with Russia is bad, he said.

To adopt Trump’s twitter style: VERY SAD!

This story was originally published January 10, 2017 at 5:02 AM with the headline "Why can’t Trump accept his victory and grow up?."