in a powerful and pointed New York Times column titled Trump's Hollow "Regrets" which is well worth your reading it.
After an introduction to set the scene, Blow asks
Precisely what does Trump regret?
He then reminds us of the many offensive things said by Trump: Megyn Kelly, the Khans, the disabled reporter, comparing Ben Carson to a child molester and linking Rafael Cruz to the assassination of JFK.
He then writes
I don’t believe, even for a nanosecond, that he regrets the personal impact of what he has said on anyone besides himself.
I believe that he only regrets that what he has said has not worked well for him in the general election portion of the campaign. That is the difference between regret as an act of public contrition and regret as an expression of personal disappointment in one’s own flagging fortunes.
But there is more, so much more.
Blow does not believe that 75 days is sufficient to change 70 years of his life, and writes
This fragile narcissist, who is a sort of bottomless pit of emotional need and affirmation, is easily injured by even the slightest confrontation.
Here I note that Trump has demonstrated he cannot handle even the mildest criticism, that if he feels criticized he hits you back even harder, no matter what it does to the discourse or the political process. Remember, he sues at the drop of a hat (and of course gets sued just as much for failure to honor his obligations).
Blow acknowledges the how effective Trump has been to some degree in working a crowd, in using his Twitter account and his rallies (and his remarks in primary debates) in riling up people, but then writes
He has the gifts of a grifter.
The problem is that, at the moment, those gifts are proving to be woefully insufficient as he continues to face horrible polling results and other Republican officials begin to reek of fear, panic and impending peril.
Blow reviews the recent news about Manafort, about the issues in his dealings in Europe and his having to resign, noting the irony that it was emails that contributed to this and remembering the continued attacks on Clinton’s email server.
There are three more paragraphs. Blow starts with a longer one which expects that Trump will suffer a massive loss in November which will mean
his ego will be forever injured as he is assigned to history not as a great man but as a great disaster, a cautionary tale of what comes of a party that picks a con man as its frontman.
a con man as its frontman something that is becoming ever more clear.
Then comes the penultimate paragraph:
Trump’s recitation of regret wasn’t so much a ruthless Saul to Apostle Paul transformation as an inverted Jekyll and Hyde monstrous illusion.
Reading that, I had to wonder whether Trump himself would understand either part of that allusion, whether he gets either reference? After all, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal has noted that he doubts Trump has ever read a book all the way through, and we know, because of “2 Corinthians” that he is not all that fluent in his understanding of scripture.
But it is Blow’s conclusion that truly summarizes all of this:
There is something rotten at the core of this man that no length of script or turn of phrase can ameliorate.
Indeed.