Donald Trump to GOP: Be nice to me, or else

Donald Trump is firing off warning shots to the Republican Party: If you criticize me too much, you're gonna be soorrrry. How much more unhappy can Trump make establishment Republicans? Quite a bit, actually:

“The RNC has not been supportive. They were always supportive when I was a contributor. I was their fair-haired boy,” the business mogul told The Hill in a 40-minute interview from his Manhattan office at Trump Tower on Wednesday. “The RNC has been, I think, very foolish.”

Pressed on whether he would run as a third-party candidate if he fails to clinch the GOP nomination, Trump said that “so many people want me to, if I don’t win.”

“I’ll have to see how I’m being treated by the Republicans,” Trump said. “Absolutely, if they’re not fair, that would be a factor.”

Don't criticize me or I'll give you a nightmare of a third-party run. Of course, this is Donald Trump, a man who routinely contradicts himself in any given paragraph, so who knows what he would do in the end. But he's got a big enough ego that he just might run for president as an independent in a fit of pique, a thought that has to have Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus lying awake at night thinking of the Republican base votes a third-party Trump candidacy could peel away.