I didn’t attend the Insult Comedian’s pity party last week. I rarely, if ever, watch his full speeches live, the clips suffice to convey the gist of his rants, harangues, or whatever you choose to call them.  Since this was a rare short speech, I watched it on the YouTube. It’s only 18 minutes long but it still felt endless.

Trump’s tone was barely controlled rage accompanied by extravagant self-pity befitting a man who gold leafed the Oval Office and tore down the East Wing. His feelings are hurt because the country doesn’t love him as much as he loves himself. We’re a nation of ingrates.

Jamelle Bouie captured my reaction to the speech, so I might as well quote him:

“If you watched the president’s address on Wednesday, you know it was less a speech than it was a harangue — an unbroken stream of angry shouting, as Donald Trump berated the American people for its ingratitude. “One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead,” Trump said. “Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

He might have added, “so why don’t you people like me?”

Good question. Here’s why: he’s a narcissistic jerk who confuses assholery with strength. His attempt to remake our institutions and even our public building in his own image has turned us into a nation of ingrates in his eyes. We should be grateful for the illegal renaming of the Kennedy Center and the East Wing teardown instead of repelled. We’re a nation of ingrates.

I’m not a fan of polls but approval rating polls are more accurate than electoral horse race polls. Read this and weep, Donald:

“… he is the most consistently unpopular president since the advent of polling. He has never had the support of a majority of Americans, not in any of his three presidential elections and not for a single day of either term in Gallup surveys.

His current 36 percent approval rating in Gallup is lower than that of every elected modern president at the end of their first year, lower even than it was in his first term (39 percent) and seven percentage points below the next-lowest (Joseph R. Biden Jr., at 43 percent). If compared against presidents who served two terms consecutively, Mr. Trump is still below each of them at the end of their fifth year, except Mr. Nixon, who had plummeted to 29 percent in the throes of Watergate.”

It’s unclear what the bottom is for Trump’s approval rating since his base is eroding over the ongoing Epstein coverup and his rants about the so-called affordability hoax. It’s hard to pivot when bad news is always dismissed as fake news. For that, this ingrate is grateful.

The last word goes to Dominic Chianese: