Donald Trump's Hideous Tantrum. Our Least Presidential President Crashes Out

by Rick Wilson - Jun 8

There is a particular kind of absurdist theater that happens when a man who has spent his life surrounded by people paid to nod and agree is suddenly collides with journalism.

Under a metal roof booming from a summer storm on a Wisconsin farm, Kristen Welker conducted that experiment in real time.

The results were not a triumph of journalism so much as a clinical observation of a figure in steep decline as a President, as a leader of a party, and as a man. The tantrum was pathetic, juvenile, and politically poisonous.

By the end, the leader of the free world stormed off the set, spitting mad and ranting like an escaped mental patient trying to convince the EMTs that aliens had implanted computer chips in his rectum.

Trump screeched like a cut hog, calling Welker crooked, stupid, and finally…“darling,” and fled into the rain like a man who’d just remembered he left the stove on.

Let’s begin with the lies, because there were so many they formed a kind of weather system of their own.

Start with the one he loves most, the one he returns to like a dog to a familiar patch of political vomit: the 2020 election. Welker, doing the thing journalists are supposed to do, asked for evidence. What she got was a man insisting “there’s more evidence than ever presented,” which is a sentence that eats itself.

I know you, dear readers, know this a titantic mountain of Trumpian lies.

There is no evidence. There has never been evidence. Sixty-odd courts, dozens of them staffed by his own appointees, looked for it and found nothing.

But watch how he pivots, because this is the tell: cornered on 2020, he leaps immediately to California, where Republicans are “dropping fast” in a count that is slow because that is, factually, how California counts votes.

The fraud is always happening now, always somewhere he can’t quite point to, always five days from being proven. It is the permanent revolution of a man who cannot accept that anyone, anywhere, has ever beaten him fairly. He is not committed to the stolen-election lie. He is fused to it. It is a defining test of the mental and moral degeneracy of everyone around him; either agree or be cast out.

Then there’s Iran, where the fabrications come industrial-grade. On Day 100 of the war, his trainwreck of a military escapade is no closer to a resolution than it was on Day 1.

He claims he “built” the most powerful military in the world, a thing presidents do not do in four years and certainly did not do while losing reelection. He claims Iran retains “21, 22 percent” of its missiles with the breezy precision of a man inventing a statistic on camera.

He claims he “took over” Venezuela “in a matter of minutes” and that the country is now “doing very well,” a sentence that would startle anyone actually in Venezuela under the continued oppression of the Delcy Rodriguez regime, but you do you, Donnie.

Concerningly, Trump’s answers on the Iranian nuclear material stockpile veered from the irrational to the imaginary, sometimes over the course of the same question.

You could watch the one trigger he knows in his feral way that has cracked part of his base: the 2024 crowd favorite that he promised no new wars.

If I may put this in language Trump understands: Sir, you ran on it three times. The clips exist in abundance.

The “no new wars” promise was not a footnote; it was the central pillar of so much of the entire America First aesthetic; it’s hard to imagine the movement without it. By serving as Bibi’s Dial-A-Military and launching Iranapalooza, he kicked it out from under himself in real time and dared us not to notice.

The recurring motif, the one that should chill anyone who thinks adults are in charge, is the body count theater.

Thirteen dead Americans, repeated like a rosary, always followed by Vietnam, always followed by “nineteen years,” as if the comparison to a generational military catastrophe is the flex he thinks it is. A naval blockade, which he cheerfully acknowledged is an act of war under international law, dismissed with “I don’t define it at all. I don’t think about it.” There it is. The whole foreign policy in one sentence.

He doesn’t think about it.

And this is the part the foreign ministries and chancelleries of the world were watching.

Because no head of state, no field marshal, no foreign minister sat through that performance and concluded they were dealing with a stable negotiating partner. They watched a man who couldn’t get through a single hostile question about a domestic terrorism slush fund without detonating.

They watched him lose the thread, lose the plot, lose his temper, and then lose the room entirely, all over Kristen Welker asking whether people who beat police officers with flagpoles should get taxpayer checks.

If a Wisconsin rainstorm and a polite anchor can crack his composure in under an hour, imagine what an actual adversary does with that. Putin took notes. Xi took notes. The Iranians he’s allegedly “very close” to a deal with took notes.

Impulse control is not a personality quirk at this level. It is the entire game, and he showed his cards to the table. To quote Hillary Clinton, a man who can be triggered by a tweet…

The exit itself deserves its plaque in the museum of presidential dignity. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.” Welker, to her credit, kept saying she’d traveled all the way to Wisconsin, the most Midwestern act of accountability imaginable, while he muttered about sitting in the rain for an hour like a man owed a medal for enduring sunlight. He didn’t end the interview. He evacuated it, stepping on the mic he’d thrown on the ground moments before.

And we have to talk about how he looked, because the country has a right to a president who appears to be metabolizing oxygen normally. The color was a kind of greasy umber, a mottled, overcooked hue that no bronzer fully explains. The sweating was conspicuous. The eyes looked swollen, the hands looked swollen, his feet were held in a strange position, and the whole effect was less “commander in chief” than “man who will be telling the EMTs if he knows what day it is.”

This is not vanity. A president’s physical state (and of course, the attendant White House coverup) is a national security matter, and the visual evidence on Sunday did not inspire confidence. It inspired the urge to take his blood pressure.

So that was the interview. A lie-a-thon conducted in a downpour, ending in a tantrum, narrated by a body that seemed to be filing its own complaint. Welker wanted answers about Iran, the economy, the weaponization fund. What she documented instead was something closer to a diagnosis.

For all the MAGA right’s obsession with their gimcrack version of masculinity, a person of Trump’s lack of discipline, febrile emotional control, and commitment to indignity is no kind of man at all.

The press, he warned on the way out, can never make a country great. Perhaps not, but neither can a president without emotional regulation and the inability to level with the American people about the world he’s busily wrecking in front of their eyes.