Thin-skinned Trump won’t apologize

Frank Cerabino his way to demean the service of U.S. Sen. John McCain, who as a Navy pilot was shot down on his 23rd combat mission over Vietnam, spending the next five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Since then, veterans groups, media outlets and other Republicans running for president have been expecting an apology from Trump. Read Frank Cerabino’s recent columns at mypalmbeachpost.

They clearly weren’t paying attention to what else Trump had said that day in Iowa in front of a group of conservative Christians.

When asked whether he ever asked for God’s forgiveness on anything, Trump said:

“I don’t think so. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture.”

The only thing Trump considers unforgivable, it seems, is to disparage him in any way.

McCain got on Trump’s atomic insult list by characterizing Trump’s supporters as “crazies.”

Clearly, it wasn’t fair for McCain to make that claim. Trump doesn’t have a corner on the crazy-Republican-voter market. Crazies are also the key demographic for the Mike

Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz campaigns.

But Trump didn’t let McCain’s remark slide. So Trump countered on Twitter by calling McCain a “dummy” for fifinishing at the bottom of his class at Annapolis.

And then, rather than dialing that back, Trump just kept taking deeper bites at McCain, like a moray eel incapable of loosening its jaw once clenched. And that led to demeaning McCain’s considerable sacrififice in fifighting a war that Trump avoided by way of a student deferment and later by a bone spur on his foot.

McCain shouldn’t take it personally. It’s just how Trump is. If you puncture his bubble of self-grandiosity, there’s just a thinskinned guy behind it.

I have a little experience in this matter. A couple of years ago, comedian Bill Maher made fun of Trump’s foolish obsession over President Barack Obama’s birth certifificate. Trump had claimed to have dispatched investigators to Hawaii, and “they cannot believe what they’re fifinding.”

Maher, as a joke, showed a photo of Trump next to one of an orang- utan and demanded to see Trump’s birth certificate.

Trump’s response was to sue Maher for $5 million, a claim that was later tossed out of court.

I wrote a column at the time that it was the orangutans, not Trump, who should be offffffffffffended by Maher’s humor.

I quoted Richard Zimmerman, the founder of Orangutan Outreach, a charity dedicated to preserving orangutan habitats in the wild.

“Trump is too meanspirited to be an orangutan,” Zimmerman told me. “Orangutans are tolerant, calm and have a good sense of humor. They chill out. They’re big Buddhas.

“They have their lives and are very peaceful. They’re not looking for trouble,” Zimmerman said. “That’s not how I would describe Mr. Trump.”

Trump responded by lashing out at The Palm Beach Post on Twitter:

“One of the country’s dumbest newspapers — The Palm Beach Post — should be put to sleep. It’s dying,” he wrote.

That’s how Trump operates. He lashes out wildly at anybody who crosses him.

If you fail to be as impressed with him as he is of himself, you are con-