Donald Trump, America’s professional wrestler in chief

Give Donald Trump credit for coming clean. He’s always been a professional-wrestling promoter at heart, not a president, trading in faked-up victories and doing anything for good ratings.

There is no doubt that the video Trump tweeted out on Sunday, cartoonishly showing himself beating up on CNN at a professional wrestling event, was an encouragement to violence against the media. Nothing new there. What’s more fascinating is just how right he looked in that environment. Trump never looks comfortable behind his desk in the Oval Office. At a professional wrestling match, he belongs.

Everything about Trump exudes pro-wrestling fakery. He brags and exaggerates and claims victories that everybody — except for a few sad souls who think pro wrestling is legit — knows are not real victories. Did you see Hulk Hogan — excuse us, Donald Trump — brag on Monday about the “great jobs numbers” his administration has racked up? Truth is, job growth in the United States has slowed since Trump took office.

With every new outrageous tweet, Trump adds to the evidence that he is temperamentally unfit to be president and lazy to boot. What kind of president, if he is hard at work on the big issues of our day — terrorism, health care reform, tax reform and the like — has time to stew about what a couple of talking heads on CNN say about him?

And yet Trump spends his mornings clicking through the cable news shows and lashing out via Twitter, going particularly hard on women critics. Joe Scarborough on CNN becomes “Psycho Joe” in a Trump tweet, and Mika Brzezinski becomes “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” who was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” the last time Trump saw her at Mar-a-Lago.

This stuff plays fine with Trump’s angry political base, happy to see another villain in the ring get slammed to the mat. There actually is a wrestler, Dan Richards, who goes by the villainous stage name of “Progressive Liberal.”

The rest of America, including a majority of Republicans, sees Trump for the boor and misogynist he is.

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