Donald J. Trump isn鈥檛 insane
Have you noticed that Donald Trump isn’t bragging about his poll numbers much these days?
That’s because he’s his poll numbers are sinking fast.
Nationally, Hillary Clinton is leading him by wide margins in most polls. In Pennsylvania, where many pundits claim Trump has a chance to turn from Democratic to Republican, Clinton is up by double digits.
It’s no mystery why this is happening.
Every time Trump opens his mouth, a controversy flops out.
The Democratic National Convention had hardly ended, when Trump ignited a number of controversies that resulted in having many of his fellow Republicans diving headlong off of the “Trump Train.”
Michael Bloomberg, one of Trump’s fellow billionaires, had stepped onto the Democratic convention stage in Philadelphia, and called Trump a “risky, reckless radical choice,” or is also a con man.
But worse, he questioned Trump’s sanity.
That set off a week of professional and non-professional panelists, arrayed across the 24-hour news cycle, debating the sanity of a presidential candidate.
They threw out highfalutin phrases like “Narcissistic personality disorder,” to support their theories.
Bunk!
I’m no clinical psychologist, but I can clearly see Donald J. Trump is sane.
I’ll go even further.
He’s stark raving sane. (with an emphasis on the raving)
However, he does have all of the maturity of an ill-tempered seven-year-old.
When Trump countered Bloomberg’s convention tirade against him, he claimed, “I was gonna hit this guy (Bloomberg) so hard his head would spin and he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.”
What he was really saying was, “Well, he hit me first.”
When Trump complains about the media, or that the election or debate schedule is “rigged,” what he’s really saying is, “Mommy, mommy, they’re picking on me.”
None of this stuff is an indication that he’s mentally of psychologically unbalanced.
It is, though, the sign of a man who is finally having his childhood pretty late in life.
He’s forever engaging in hyperbole.
He claims he won the Republican nomination by the widest margin in history.
That’s true.
He also claims he got 14 million votes.
That’s not true.
He only got 13.3 million votes. He’s rounded the true number way, way up.
(In fact, he cleverly omits the fact that there had been 16 million voters in Republican primaries who voted for other candidates during the primaries. That’s also a record number)
His hyperbolic rhetoric extends beyond how many people really did vote for him before his nomination.
He likes to say that the real unemployment rate is several times higher than it actually is.
He’s been quoted as saying (as only he can) “In fact, I even heard recently (that it’s) 42 percent.”
The unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been at or below five percent since last October.
But to the seven-year-old who’s trying to move into the White House, it’s like he swore he did his homework, when he was really so busy playing Pokemon GO, that he never bothered to crack open a book.
Oh, There’re times when Hillary Clinton, and her emails, give Mr. Trump openings, but he can’t seem to stay on script.
For some reason, he adlibs in ways that resemble a kid who has been told to go to bed, but who keeps talking about anything with the hope that his parents will forget the issued the order.
Then, he has his “pet projects.”
He repeats his lines about “building a wall,” as if it’ll be made out of Legos.
And he fosters fears about undocumented Mexicans, Muslims or Syrian refugees, by framing them in a fashion that a small child would about when his parents turn off the lights, a monster will appear under his bed.
Insane? No. Emotionally unstable? I’d bet he isn’t. Immature? Probably.
Anybody who can’t keep his mouth shut when it counts – or, who is so thin-skinned that they can’t resist having public temper tantrums, isn’t a danger to themselves.
They’re a danger to the country.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net