“I’ve been treated very unfairly” by the RNC, Donald Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in a townhall forum that Trump threatened to boycott because he complained that CNN treated him unfairly. What did CNN do to treat Trump unfairly? They had commentators on panels that criticized him. What did the RNC do to treat Trump unfairly, and thus negate his pledge to support the party’s nominee whoever it turned out to be? Er … Mitt Romney criticized him.

No, really:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFzIIeAi110

Let’s face it — The Pledge has been a joke for some time. It served a purpose until the primaries started, which was to keep Trump from bailing out of the GOP process and launching a third-party bid. Over the last couple of months, though, it’s been clear that Trump is too self-absorbed to rally troops on behalf of someone else, and too thin-skinned to accept criticism, let alone defeat. No one who has paid any attention to Trump’s antics over the past year could possibly have thought that Trump would campaign for someone else, or even have anything nice to say about someone who beat him to the nomination.

If Trump thought Cooper would be sympathetic to this kind of argument, he got a surprise tonight. Cooper dressed him down for acting like a child when it came to the War Of The Wives:

Cooper asked Trump about his ongoing feud with rival Ted Cruz, which started after an anti-Trump super PAC circulated a racy image of Trump’s wife, Melania. Trump later retweeted an image of Melania next to Cruz’s wife, Heidi, in what Cooper called an “unflattering” pose. Trump said he thought the photo of Heidi was “nice,” and when pressed by Cooper, said, “I didn’t start it.” Cooper responded by telling the Republican frontrunner “with all due respect, that’s the argument of a 5-year-old,” adding that “every parent knows that.” “That’s the problem,” Trump retorted. “Exactly that thinking is the problem this country has. I didn’t start this, he started this.”

If Trump believes that the RNC staged Mitt Romney’s criticism to make him look bad, does anyone think for a moment that Trump would take a loss at the convention as just the breaks of a well-fought contest? Puh-leeeeeeze. Trump either spikes the ball, or he takes it and goes home. There is no room in his world for another quarterback, and anything but cheerleading is all the evidence Trump needs to claim victimhood.

Update: The response from Trump supporters has mainly been, “Cruz and Kasich reneged on the pledge first tonight!” According to CNN’s transcripts, Kasich came on after Trump, not before. As for Cruz, he never explicitly declared that he would renege on the pledge: