Trump's Personality is Hands-Down Unpresidential

WASHINGTON -- Oh, those hands. Donald Trump holds them out, regards them, waves them for everyone in the gleaming conference room to see. How surreal is this? We are talking NATO, the Senkaku Islands, nuclear proliferation ... and hands.

"My hands are fine," Trump says. "You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, OK?"

Is this really happening? "Surreal" may not capture the utter weirdness of the moment. We are talking hand size -- and other size -- with the Republican front-runner. For president.

The topic, admittedly, has been broached not by Trump but by the otherwise cerebral editor of The Washington Post's editorial page, Fred Hiatt. "You are smart and you went to a good school," Hiatt says.

He is following up on Trump's boilerplate assurances about his intellect, complete with reference to his MIT-professor uncle, "one of the brilliant people." It's not my place to interrupt, not too much, but I'm dying here. I know this is a standard part of Trump's campaign-trail assurances, but, really, he thinks the editorial board is going to be impressed by a smart uncle?

Trump's point about his intellect, or at least the point he starts off with, is that he fully understands the "two phases," campaigning and governing, and that presidential Trump will kick in once there is President Trump.

Candidate Trump had to knock off 16 opponents, he notes. "They are almost all gone. If I were going to do that in a different fashion, I think I probably wouldn't be sitting here. You would be interviewing somebody else. But it is hard to act presidential when you are being -- I mean, actually I think it is presidential because it is winning."

OK, one Trump, two Trumps, whatever. This is Forrest Gump meets Vince Lombardi. Presidential is as presidential does. Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.

But back to Hiatt's question: "Yet you are up there and talking about your hands and the size of ... your private parts."

The intention here is not to be provocative, or to get back into the gutter. It is to test, actually, whether Trump might be ready to enter a new, more mature phase. Marco Rubio -- "Liddle Marco," in Trump's spelling -- has said he regretted going there, and boy, should he. Does Trump wish he hadn't responded in kind, hadn't brought up the subject, unprovoked, at a presidential debate?

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