Trump a whiner. Who knew?

Generally, I don’t watch  televised political debates.  Candidates are most often so scripted and their programmed responses to questions so dull and mechanical that you do not learn anything from them during the debate.  For the second Presidential debate of this pestilential year of national politics  I held my not worth watching position, but did flip the channel from Sunday night football a couple of times just to get a flavor for what was happening at the debate. Much to my surprise, I did learn something: perhaps something that many others had noticed before but that only came clear to me watching snippets of the debate.

Donald Trump is a whiner.  He whined when the moderators would not let him ramble on past his two minute limit (which both candidates did regularly).  He whined about how the moderators were not fair.  He whined that Secretary Clinton was allowed to talk past her two minute limit for responses just as he did.  He whined about the Presidential Debate Commission not letting him get away with a tasteless stunt of putting four women who have accused former President Clinton of sexual harassment in seats in the family section of the debate audience.  Who knew. Donald Trump is a whiner.

Most of us get over our whining stage after our teenage years.  We have learned that whining not only sounds silly but that it does not do much good.  As we grow older we learn that it is important for us to take responsibility for our actions.  That is what adults are supposed to do.

Whining is most generally associated with losers.  People who fail to accomplish something because they say they were cheated, treated unfairly by some controlling authority, or because no one understands them.  Rather than trying to understand what actually happened when something does not go the way you want it to, the whiner looks around for anyone and anything else he can blame.  I did not catch the high fly  ball because the sun was in my eyes.  I sliced my drive off the fifth tee because you were taking a practice swing behind me just before I tried to hit my drive. The dog ate my homework. The analogies are multitudinous.

I suppose in some part of my brain it had occurred to me that Mr.Trump is a whiner, but it was not until I flipped channels in and out of the televised Presidential debate that it struck home with me that he really is a consistent whiner.  Each time I switched channels into the debate Trump was saying something about how he was being treated unfairly or that it was some one else’s fault that he had done something stupid.  As he stalked around the stage like some amateur actor auditioning for a walk-on role as Darth Vader in a grade C movie, he was  constantly blaming someone else for something he had done or complaining that he had somehow been treated unfairly.

I have long believed there is an extensive list of substantive reasons why Donald Trump should never be elected President of the United States. It did not really become clear to me though, until the most recent Presidential debate, that there is a less substantive, but I would argue not unimportant problem with Mr. Trump.  He is a whiner.

He refuses to take responsibility for his own errors and actions.  Whenever something does not go the way he wants it to go he either simply lies about it or says it was someone else’s fault, not his.  He is always being treated unfairly.  Even before something happens he complains that it will happen, that it will not be his fault and that it is happening because someone is being unfair to him. He whines.   He is a whiner.

 

Robert Lenna

About Robert Lenna

My professional career has been involved in bringing to Maine the financial capital to build our infrastructure of housing, schools, roads, hospitals, colleges, water and sewer districts. As Executive Director of four independent state authorities charged with putting together public financing for hundreds of infrastructure projects I was responsible for bringing billions of dollar into the Maine economy.