"If I run and if I win, this country will be respected again," Trump said this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Washington.
Trump has been pitching hard, trying to persuade people that he ought to be a serious contender in The Reagan Apprentice, a reality show better known as the Republican presidential primary.
And a President Trump would continue the beatings, he promised:
He would vanquish the Somali pirates with "one good admiral and a couple of good ships," he said. He'd raise taxes on other countries instead of American citizens. And he'd thwart international disrespect at every turn.
"The United States has become a whipping post for the rest of the world," Trump said. "The world is treating us without respect."
Made-for-TV candidacy
Clearly, the respect angle is very big with Trump, who has said he will decide whether to run by June.
This dovetails nicely with the upcoming season of his TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice.
The presidential announcement might be envisioned as a ratings booster as Trump tries to echo Le-Bron James, who turned his contract announcement into a TV show last year.
Trump probably imagines a national moment of rapt attention as he announces whether he will take his talents to Washington .
But there's already a problem with the script. Within a week of his big-stick CPAC speech, Trump was served up a steaming hot bowl of disrespect at the future site of his Winter White House.
Superstar singer Rihanna, who was booked for months to sing for Trump and others at a gala at Palm Beach's Mar-a-Lago on Saturday night, canceled that morning, claiming to have bronchitis, according to The Palm Beach Post's Jose Lambiet.
But Rihanna was actually spending the weekend in Southern California, where she was pushing her new fragrance, Reb'l Fleur, at Macy's and doing some full-throated singing as part of the halftime show at Sunday night's NBA All-Star Game.
How could this be?
Who'd be next? OPEC or Lil' Kim?
A week earlier, Pretend-President Trump had told CPAC he would lower oil prices by simply getting Middle East oil producers on the phone and telling them, "That price better get lower, and it better get lower fast."
I would think if he could control the price of Arab oil with the sound of his voice, he certainly could have restored respect to Mar-a-Lago by getting the foreign-born Rihanna on the phone Saturday morning and saying, "That bronchitis you don't really have better get cured, and it better get cured fast."
But now it looks like Trump is capable of getting pushed around by a 23-year-old female pop star from Barbados.
"For Rihanna to go to the All-Star Game and perform after she told us she was sick, that is just a lack of respect," Trump told Lambiet.
Yes, a lack of respect.
Just the sort of thing President Trump was supposed to cure.
The pretend-campaign is off to a bad start.
For now, we can only imagine that a Trump-led America not only stands to get disrespected by OPEC, China and Mexico, but by Missy Elliott, Da Brat and Lil' Kim .
