Bob Franken: Tempering Donald

It's hard to believe, but Donald Trump's extraordinarily obnoxious quest to become president has deteriorated into something quite ordinary, your standard plain old campaign conniption fit. Like any other 70-year-old spoiled kid who isn't getting his way, he's throwing a temper tantrum.

He's lashing out at anyone who crosses him, which is everybody but his staff members (some of them) and the craven politicians of his party who are afraid to drop him like a stone because doing so might offend the all-important Republican "deplorable" base. Now he's figuratively screaming, not just about jailing Hillary Clinton, but in targeting all the conspirators who are piling on – like the media, the international bankers and all those members of a planetwide cabal dedicated to electing her.

The whole thing, he charges, is rigged, meaning that after he goes down to defeat, his millions of followers won't accept the result. Of course he's playing with fire, but he doesn't care about that. No 70-year-old entitled delinquent does. Donald is a boy who even bragged about the fact that he'd molest women whenever he felt like it, and barged in on them when they were naked in the dressing rooms he owned.

And now that he's confronted with the reality that his past misbehavior could mean that he might not get his latest toy – in this case, the presidency – he's going bonkers. We've seen it in other kiddies: They have their hissy, and when that doesn't do the trick, they get hissier and hissier. Why? Because they've gotten away with it for so long that the idea of consequences is simply for others.

This is the man-child, after all, who has built his fortune not just on Daddy's squandered money, but on the backs of those he has cheated in business, on the laws he has manipulated, to say nothing of his nonstop stream of hate aimed at nearly every member of the human race – Muslims, Hispanics, women, the disabled, anybody who's smarter than he is, which means just about everyone except the uneducated whites he counts on to be swayed by his ignorance.

Did I mention that he gets away with constant lying? So this time, when the evidence of his sexual imposition is so persuasive, he's going bananas. They're all making it up, he bellows; they're all a part of that conspiracy. Besides, some of the women are not pretty enough for him to grope, which usually would be the most ridiculous thing you could say. But his deplorables lap it up.

He's even suggested that Hillary doesn't measure up in the looks department, as if it matters who turns him on or not. She probably appears in his immature mind like that schoolmarm who used to tell him "no," and would be unmoved when he had outbursts like the current one.

Imagine the consequences if he's elected, and we inevitably have government by tantrum.

(Bob Franken is a syndicated columnist.)

(c) 2016 Bob Franken

Distributed by King Features Synd.