Well, 8 PM ET came and went, to paraphrase TS Eliot, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” In the latest episode of Trump’s reality show presidency, he decided he’ll give Iran “another two weeks” (we’ll get to that in a minute) to open the Strait of Hormuz because something something Pakistan something.

Some are suggesting it was a predictable TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out” — while others, including at least one retired general who was on MSNOW yesterday, say sources tell them that the commanders at CENTCOM simply and bluntly refused to carry out his and Whiskey Pete’s orders to commit massive war crimes.

In either case, it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump has backed down. Throughout his entire life, this nepo-baby has only been good at two things beyond inheriting and squandering his father’s money.

The first has been manipulating the press to get publicity for himself, a skill he fine-tuned in the 1980s (as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink) and has been on display throughout this Iran debacle (and the entire past decade).

He started with the New York tabloids and talk shows, then graduated to a national stage when he began accusing Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya. Now he does it daily from the White House and his tacky golf motel in Florida.

You could argue that he came by this skill honestly, driven by his being raised by a psychopathic father and a distant, sickly mother. He never felt loved, and never learned how to love, turning all his efforts into getting attention — which he translated into approval and love — from others. His deep sense of being unloved and unworthiness underlies and drives much of his own psychopathy.

And his literal hate for anybody — particularly women — who doesn’t completely defer to him shows up almost daily in press conferences and on his helicopter and plane trips when he slaps down mostly-women reporters with epithets like “piggy” and “you’re stupid” for having had the temerity to ask him a non-flattering question or one that may reveal his criminality or ignorance.

His other, second skill was learned: NBC spent literally millions of dollars teaching Trump how to be a reality show host, which is the other role he’s playing now.

There can be little doubt that this cruel narcissist got pleasure and a deep satisfaction from telling people less powerful than him, “You’re fired,” but it was NBC’s producers and media consultants who taught him how to raise expectations, heighten tension, drag out a tease, and the importance of always rebooting the show at least every two weeks, lest the public forget the storyline and move on.

His perverse delight in turning others’ lives upside-down by firing them, first experienced in real time on The Apprentice set, now translates into the callous way he jettisons anybody in his orbit he doesn’t consider appropriately obsequious; Pam Bondi is just the most recent in a long list of people he went out of his way to humiliate.

His cabinet meetings similarly reflect his lessons learned doing TV for NBC when he’d gather people around a table in the boardroom........

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