All journalists know that if you’re interviewing a childish little sensitive pisshead baby, you must do so very carefully, to avoid making him run out of the room crying. One of these little pisshead babies is now our president.


This morning Time magazine published a new interview with Donald Trump that is ostensibly about “truth and falsehoods,” but can also be usefully viewed as a guide to The Indignities Inherent in Interviewing a Stupid Idiot Who Is Momentarily In Charge But Is Still a Pee Boy.

In it, you can witness Time’s Michael Scherer attempting to tippy-toe the basic question, “Why the hell do you lie all the time?” into an interview with a guy who is ultra-sensitive and likely to throw a tantrum at the merest sign of disrespect. If you are an adult who is accustomed to speaking to adults who are able to hold at least semi-rational conversations about important topics, it’s excruciating! This is a taste of what it is like to have a Pee Boy President:

One of my ideas here is that throughout the campaign and now as president, you have used disputed statements, this is one of them that is disputed, the claim that three million undocumented people voted in the election… Well I think I will be proved right about that too. The claim that Muslims celebrated on 9-11 in New Jersey… Well if you look at the reporter, he wrote the story in the Washington Post. But my idea is that whatever the reality of what you are describing, the fact that they are disputed makes them a more effective message, that you are able to spread the message further, that more people get excited about it, that it gets on TV. Well now if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong, in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people. In fact I’m forming a committee on it. But there’s no evidence that 3 million people voted with… We’ll see after the committee. I have people say it was more than that. We will see after we have. But there will be, we are forming a committee. And we are going to do a study on it, a very serious problem. Is there anything different about making these kinds of predictions without having the factual evidence as President? I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right.

One distinguishing characteristic of conversations with children is that at a certain point one must acknowledge that it is a waste of time to try to reason with a simpering little piss baby because they will do and say anything to justify themselves and will never, ever admit the fact that there is pee running down their leg, even if it is clearly visible on the floor.