[Special] Editorial: Inside Donald Trump's Machado Disaster

As Graydon Carter noted over a year ago, "Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret." The Hillary Clinton campaign obviously knows this, because they set Donald Trump up for an epic meltdown, and he did not fail to deliver. As Josh Marshall of TPM explained:

As many have already noted, Clinton's mention of Alicia Machado's treatment at Trump's hands was no random, momentary decision. They'd seen Curiel; they'd seen Khan. She and her team know how Trump's lack of empathy, self-awareness and narcissism makes him ripe for these days' or weeks' long self-destructive tirades.

They laid the trap and he walked right into it.

Anyone with the most basic communications experience or simply a conscience knows there's a simple and solitary way to deal with something like this: "We quarreled years ago. I'm sorry we did. That's a long time ago. I wish her the best." Done and done.

But Trump can't do that because Trump can never admit he was wrong. In fact, it's more than an inability to admit error he has an affirmative need to be right and for everyone to know it. That's why, to the joy of Democrats, he's now on his third day of trashing Machado and defending his own actions, even though the story almost certainly would have died out without him doing so.

By Wednesday night, in his appearance on O'Reilly, he started the show off with a lengthy monologue attacking Machado. Far from mistreating her, he said, he'd saved her job; he'd given her the opportunity to lose weight (yes, this is a fair characterization of his words). And this was the thanks he got!

After that incident, Trump lashed out in the middle of the night, as compiled by The Atlantic, tweeting out during the 3 o'clock and 5 o'clock morning hours. The Chicago Tribune describes part of the embarrassing scene:

"Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?" read a missive from Trump posted on Twitter at 5:30 a.m. That referred to 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a Venezuela-born woman whose weight gain he has said created terrible problems for the pageant he formerly owned.

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Shaming Machado over intimate details from her past could be particularly risky as Trump tries to win over more female voters, many of whom are turned away by such personal attacks. It also risks calling further attention to the thrice-married Trump's own history with women.

Finally, Marshall summarized it all: 

Trump hit a brick wall in Monday night's debate. He didn't prepare. It took Hillary Clinton, a woman he'd spent weeks calling frail and weak, only 15 or 20 minutes to knock him off stride and reduce him to a defensive posture for the rest of the debate. In boxing terms, she had him on the ropes in under half an hour and landed punches at will for the next hour. He attacked, interrupted, brought up various attack lines. But he was fundamentally reacting to her throughout. She dominated him in front of more than 80 million people. His inability to contain or damage her kept him angry and unfocused, flailing through the encounter.

After this, he denied anything had gone wrong in the debate, insisting that he'd won. This would be at least partly expected for any campaign but this was more wounded pride than spin. Then he got angry at staffers and supporters who said he'd underperformed. Then he spent three days calling a woman fat and saying he'd gotten no thanks for giving her the 'opportunity' to stop being fat.

Then he was up just after 5 am this morning ranting at Machado on twitter, calling her "disgusting", talking about a seemingly non-existent "sex tape." Even though there's no evidence there's any 'sex tape' and I assume there's not, I suspect we'll learn that someone told Trump something or showed him something that made him think there was or might be. I don't think the timing is accidental. I suspect he felt he had something new, game-changing and punishing. He could not wait. The words in the flurry of early morning tweets pulses with a rage that goes beyond even what Trump's usually capable of.

When I started this blog, I did not want to write my own opinions. I just wanted to share other people's stories about Trump, without comment, and people could come to their own conclusions. Obviously, I was selecting snippets which I thought were the most ridiculous and the most damaging, and only the densest of individuals would think I was in favor of Trump. However, Trump continues to fall further and further into the abyss. He is a trainwreck, a disaster of a politician and a reprehensible human being. This episode is another example of Trump as a human pile of excrement.