Or he could have doubled down in a lighthearted way.

It’s simply too yuge to ignore, Fred—but seriously, let’s not waste our time with this nonsense, okay?

Instead, he spoke about the matter at great length, starting with the most unnerving defense of his behavior that he could’ve offered. “No, I had to do it,” he said. “Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands. A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little.”

He wants to lead the U.S. military. Yet he tells us that he had to act as he did partly because of a cartoon on the cover of a magazine. What could Vladimir Putin bait Donald Trump into doing with a strategic joke about his executive branch?

Trump’s apparent insecurity only grew more conspicuous as the interview wore on.“Look at my hands,” he said. “They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that,” he continued, name-checking another Manhattan media figure whose opinion he evidently cares about. “My hands are normal hands.”

Next he invoked Marco Rubio in the fashion of a child getting scolded by his mother:

During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it.

As his lengthy monologue continued, one began to sense that he didn’t mind the subject:

So, what I said a couple of days later… and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had 50 people… Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say… now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.

I’ll be the first to stipulate that Donald Trump’s hands are likable enough. But I have a hard time believing that folks on the campaign trail were spontaneously marveling at their splendor. Regardless, a man who talks like this––never mind what a campaign rival said about him––is betraying an alarming relationship with trivial slights. His hands are normal, just like he says, and I presume that his most loyal apprentice is proportionate to them. It is Trump’s dogged determination to ensure that no one thinks otherwise that suggests a dearth of self-assurance at his core.