America's next president is a grown man who reacts to perceived slights with the sophistication of a seven-year-old boy who loses a game of Go Fish! with his mother and runs around the room knocking stuff off tables. How do you even deal with that? There are days you just want to send Donald Trump to his room.

One of those days came late last week. Mr. Trump threw a tantrum when Jill Stein, the Leader of the Green Party, said she and others would seek a recount of the vote in three swing states.

No fair, cried Mr. Trump, and then he tweeted this: "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

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Yeah, not only can Donald clobber his mother at cards if he wants, but he would have beaten her by even more if she hadn't cheated. Upstairs, mister!

Mr. Trump and his transition team have zero evidence to back his claim. The White House and voting officials across the country have declared the election fair and accepted the outcome. It is a near certainty that, after any recounting is done, he will still be president-elect, and his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton, will still have won the popular vote by more than two million ballots.

But Mr. Trump can't handle challenges to his authority, and he has no relationship whatsoever with the rules of fair play. During the campaign, when he said he might not accept the outcome of the election on the outrageous grounds that the voting system was "rigged" against him, he defended his position by pointing out, correctly, that it is the right of any candidate to ask for a recount.

Well, not any candidate, it turns out. Just him. When an opponent does it, that's no fair.

Donald Trump is 70. This is not a phase he will grow out of. Between his lack of experience, his habit of believing the last thing anyone told him, his appeasement of white supremacists and racists who feed on the lie that immigrants and minority groups vote illegally, and his overseas business dealings that will put him and his family in a flagrant conflict of interest once he takes power, America is in for a turbulent four years.

Add to that Mr. Trump's emotional fragility, and the picture darkens further.