Twitter Tantrums: Can Trump Start Acting His Age?

Trump is 70 years old. Is that not surprising? Trump seems to be missing the traditional reservoir of enlightened wisdom that age typically pools.

Despite being a septuagenarian, Trump has the emotional sangfroid of a six-year-old in ignoring criticism and letting things go. He has never learned to pick his battles, choosing instead to fight them all.

Trump’s blank political resume may be to blame. Though his campaign presents his history of public-minded apathy as a political strength, it is a personal weakness. Trump loves to dish out ethically offensive personal smears, but clearly has never learned to take any. He reveals himself as both a crybaby and a First Amendment ignoramus when he threatens to sue the free press out of existence.

Last week Trump suggested that Hillary Clinton was the co-founder of ISIS and implied (allegedly with sarcasm) that she should be shot, but then threw a Twitter tantrum when the media printed his words exactly as he said them. How mean of the media to publish skepticism toward his claim that his political rival is an existential enemy!

But tiny Trump does not whine just that the media is “disgusting“: his campaign is complaining that the media is unfair. It is the classic accusation of a toddler, and it is comedically ironic coming from the media spotlight narcissist who proudly proclaims that “all press is good press.” For a self-acclaimed businessman, Trump’s news-saturation strategy has been a terrible business decision, both politically and financially. His obsessive vanity is truly unbecoming of a man whose children have children.

Trump’s claims of unfairness—and rigged elections for that matter—suggest that he has a psychological problem with rumination. He ruminates about unfairness without ever arriving at the simple solution to just shut his mouth. Can he not learn from trial and error? This is visibly frustrating for the GOP leaders who beg him on a weekly basis to attempt self-control in filtering his thoughts before saying everything that he thinks, but stream-of-consciousness is just how Trump’s squirrel brain operates. Trump is wholly and singularly capable of ending the daily onslaught of negative cable news coverage he receives, but his reaction to criticism is always to double down. Somehow his seventy years have never taught him to quit digging when in a hole.

It is a temperamentally unstable quality, and, measuring by his constant hurricane of Twitter feuds, he is the pettiest and most self-conscious politician in modern American history. While being one of the oldest candidates to ever run, if elected, Trump would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. What a presidential change in chill if Trump succeeds Barack Obama.

If Ronald Reagan was a charming grandpa figure for the nation, Trump makes quite a Republican contrast as America’s brat-in-chief looking for a new ego-high because being a billionaire is really easy when one inherits a fortune and an already-successful corporate brand. Maybe losing Election 2016 to Hillary Clinton in a landslide will finally make Trump start acting his age.