Mammal of the Year

Donald Trump's neediness is embarrassing because it's so revealing of his insecurity. Did his mother not hug him as a child? Did his father not show him any affection?

A year ago when Time magazine picked Angela Merkel as its Person of the Year rather than Donald Trump, Trump tweeted, “I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite. They picked [the] person who is ruining Germany.”

A week later at one of his rallies in Mesa, Arizona, with thousands of the slavish worshipping at his feet, he couldn't resist scratching at that scab:

“I was on their cover four, five weeks ago. They should have picked me for the ‘Person of the Year,’ but they didn’t. No, they should have,” Trump said. “ … I said I’m never going to get it because I’m not establishment. But every panel that I saw on television when Time was — because, you know, it’s sort of cool, even though the magazine’s going down the tubes. No, it’s a cool thing. Most magazines are going down, in all fairness to them. It’s great, isn’t it? To watch these guys go down the tubes? Isn’t it great? I love it.”

Today, having been named Time's Man of the Year for 2016, Trump is presumably thrilled that the magazine is not going down the tubes but rather shooting for the stars because it's got Trump on its cover:

“It's a great honor,” the president-elect said on NBC's “Today” show on Wednesday morning. “It means a lot, especially me growing up reading Time magazine. And it's a very important magazine, and I've been lucky enough to be on the cover many times this year — and last year. But I consider this a very, very great honor.”

Since he launched his campaign for the presidency, Trump's been on the cover of many magazines. According to Jenna Johnson, "Trump keeps stacks of these magazines in his office and jokes that he doesn’t have time to read all of them because there are so many. He has said that he’s like a 'supermodel, except, like, times 10.' ”

Trump's obsessive preoccupation with himself and whether everybody is looking at him enough -- the tally on how many times his picture is on the cover of a magazine may be the least of it -- and the ample documentation that he does not or cannot govern his impulses -- all this suggests that he is possessed by delusions of personal greatness, which is compensating for a deep-seated feeling of worthlessness.

No matter how much you folks adore him, it will never fill the hole in his heart.