Donald the whiner

Donald Trump is given to superlatives, so let’s do him the honor ofpronouncing him the  most fabulous whiner  in all of American politics. By Trump’s own account, he’s the baddest, smartest thing going, except if you ask him a challenging question, in which case he kicks and screams and demands to know how anyone could treat him so unfairly. Trump followed up his shaky-at-best performance at the first Republican candidate debate, hosted by Fox News, with days complaining that he hadn’t been afforded the respect he deserves. According to Trump, he’ll bring Vladimir Putin to heel. He’ll make Mexico pay for a border fence. He’ll take the Middle East’s oil. Assuming, that is, no one says a discouraging word to him. Then he’ll lose it. The mogul did indeed get a series of tough questions from the Fox debate moderators (disclosure: I’m a Fox News contributor). But Trump, as Trump always reminds us, is leading in  all the polls. It is not unusual -- indeed, it is to be expected -- that  a front-runner gets more scrutiny than the also-rans. Fox anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about how he would respond to inevitable attacks from Hillary Clinton in a general election over his crass insults of women through the years. This set Trump off, but does anyone think if, say, Jeb Bush had ever called woman a pig or a dog, he wouldn’t get asked about it, too? Trump handled the ensuing flap  with his typical aplomb and class, which is to say he flailed about wildly and hurled witless insults. He denied that he said the things Kelly alleged he had, even though he did. He called Kelly an overrated lightweight.  Finally, he bizarrely said that “there was blood coming out of her  eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” When this was interpreted as  a reference to her menstrual cycle,Trump objected that there was no way he possibly could say something so crude -- all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. He also insisted that when he said “wherever,” he had been about to say Kelly’s nose or ears, but stopped himself to get on with more important points -- which happened to be more insults of Kelly. 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. When he said a few weeks ago that John McCain wasn’t a war hero, he backtracked and tried to prove that he hadn’t said what he obviously had.  If “never complain, never explain” is a good rule of life, Trump is 0 for 2. If he didn’t want to be wrongfooted on the biggest stage of the campaign so far, he could have thought about what questions he might have been asked and about possible answers. This is what candidates have done before debates since time immemorial. Trump was satisfied with Plan B: to wing it and, when it didn’t go to his liking, whine like a spoiled child who didn’t get a pony for his birthday. Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review