Trump Is the Pettiest President Yet. Sad!

Let me tell you: What Nordstrom did to Ivanka was very bad! These are bad guys! Ivanka's clothing line was great! Fantastic! My press secretary tells me that sales were excellent! Very unfair! What they did was DISHONEST. Will be speaking with my labor secretary to see what steps can be taking against this failing garbage department store! Sad. LOSERS!

Donald Trump has every right to stand up for his family, and particularly his daughter, Ivanka Trump. She's just an innocent businesswoman, trying to leverage her family name to sell her questionable, foreign-made lifestyle brand. People should leave her alone. She didn't ask for any of this. She didn't stump for Trump on the campaign trail or attempt to hawk a $10,000 bracelet after the president-Elect's appearance on 60 Minutes. It was very unfair of Nordstrom to drop Ivanka Trump's clothing line.

All the haters should leave Ivanka alone, unless they want to stock her clothing line, in which case they should get in touch.

What happened yesterday—Trump attacking a major US department store chain from the official POTUS Twitter account—wasn't a conflict of interest. "My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by Nordstrom," he tweeted (from his personal account, before retweeting it using the @POTUS handle). "She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!"

The President had a busy schedule yesterday—phonetics until lunch, then literally stacks of curtain brochures to get through before a cable-TV supper—but he still took time out of his day to defend Ivanka, because what those bad hombres did to her was terrible. Nordstrom are not Good Guys.

President Trump would not launch a personal attack on a major American employer without good reason. It's not true that sales of Ivanka's clothing line have been poor for some time, and Nordstrom was facing an uphill PR battle to stock a product range that, by all accounts, none of their customers wanted to buy. You must have been reading some alternative facts.

Some people have attacked our democratically-elected-with-a-minority-of-the-public-vote President by saying that what he did was unconstitutional and an abuse of office. They've even described his behaviour as petty! But they're missing the point. Presidents are entitled to be vainglorious narcissists incapable of distinguishing personal insult from public office—there's even a historical precedent for this. Many American presidents have also been lousy at their jobs and prone to irrational behaviour. Literally, some.

"We don't have an index for pettiness," explains Professor Jack Rakove, a Stanford University expert in the presidency and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the US constitution. What Professor Rakove doesn't know about petty presidents isn't worth knowing, basically.

"Some presidents—like Jimmy Carter, for example—got deeply involved with administrative details," Rakove explains. "But the basic lesson we've learned over the last three weeks is that you cannot compare Trump to anyone else. He is just a unique character in so many ways: his lack of political background, his lack of knowledge in how the political system operates beyond trying to manipulate it for corporate purposes." Hear that? Our president is UNIQUE.

Admittedly, Rakove isn't convinced Trump read the job description before his first day at big school, but what does this Pulitzer Prize-winning expert in the constitution actually know? "He took the presidential oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States, but most of us think he has no knowledge of what is actually in the constitution."

That said, Trump is remarkable. He is a remarkable guy! Let the nice professor explain why. "The remarkable thing about Trump is that he doesn't like to read," Rakove explains. "He likes his information in very small doses." Unlike presidents Obama or Clinton, Trump doesn't have a corrupt, establishment legal background. "The problem with Trump is that his information level is very low, but his narcissism and vulnerability to any implication of it is very high. That leads to these strange tweet storms, these outbursts of his personal feelings."

Trump's rush to defend Ivanka's honor does have a rough historical analogue. "There was a question about the marital status of Andrew Jackson's wife in the 1828 election, and whether she and her first husband had been properly divorced," he observes. "It became a big campaign issue, and Jackson was accused of being a bigamist and adulterer. That's probably the closest you'd get, because it became a matter of honor. Jackson's wife was being—as you'd say—'dissed', in a super-moralistic way."

Plus, Nixon didn't have any friends either. "Nixon had one friend, a car dealer—Bebe Rebozo. They didn't talk much, but his presence was reassuring. But Trump doesn't even have that. It really depends on his family, and other than the daughter, they all seem to be abandoning him." Without a Bebe to his Nixon, Trump is all alone in his big-boy house, without even the ghosts of petty presidents past to console him.

"It's a lonely image," Rakove observes.