Trump Uses Campaign Stop in Roanoke to Whine Incessantly about Air Conditioning

Hotel Roanoke
Hotel Roanoke

You may have missed it but back in May Bill Maher made the point that Donald Trump behaves like the 1950s anti-woman stereotype of a know-nothing complainer. “If Trump was a man,” Maher said on “Real Time,” his HBO show,”he’d stop whining like a little bitch.” He referred to The Donald as “Lady Trump,” because “he’s a whiny little bitch.”

And thus was born the hashtag, #whinylittlebitch.

Personally, I avoid the B-word because it strikes me as inherently misogynist. I prefer to call women who behave like jerks or assholes, “jerks” or “assholes.”

But check out this report from a local newspaper in Roanoke about the way Trump behaved during a campaign rally there on Monday. If the hashtag fits…

[In] in the biggest room in the finest hotel in Roanoke, along with at least 1,600 chanting and cheering Trumpeteers, the candidate trained his attention-deficit-disordered thoughts on a purely apolitical topic: The room was too hot.

Trump's whining is nothing new -- as this 1990 cover from Spy Magazine attests
Trump’s whining is nothing new — as this 1990 cover from Spy Magazine attests
He whined and whined about The Hotel Roanoke’s air conditioning. No kidding.

“I think this ballroom and the people who run this hotel should be ashamed,” Trump told the crowd. “I think it’s actually cooler outside than it is in this damn ballroom.” (It wasn’t.)

He boasted there were 1,000 people standing outside on the Wells Avenue side in 104-degree heat, listening to him on loudspeakers. (There weren’t; there were at most 50, according to a city firefighter who was outside, and the temperature never hit 100.)

Perhaps jokingly, Trump suggested he wouldn’t pay the bill — after his campaign apparatus commandeered a large chunk of the hotel for most of the day. Trump’s a tough guy, see. Nobody takes advantage of him. Especially, whoever runs the thermostat.

“I feel like I’m in a sauna. I don’t know what hotel this is,” Trump went on. “You let people suffer and don’t turn on the air conditioning. This is ridiculous.”

It was ridiculous, but not in the way Trump intended. The ridiculous part was him standing there wailing about it.

He suggested the hotel turned off the AC to save money. (It didn’t. The main ballroom’s air conditioning was set at 63 degrees. “We did have it set as low as it could possibly go,” said Michael Quonce, the hotel’s public relations manager. “It was running at 99 percent efficiency.”)

Trump’s comments were chintzy, low-rent, third-rate and wholly unbecoming for a major party presidential nominee. But they are pure Trump, full of narcissistic bullying, worrying about his own comfort, picking on an entity that can’t pick back.

For the record, the hotel doors were open for two hours before he began speaking, to let in thousands of Trumpeteers (some were shunted off to an overflow ballroom). People were packed in the main ballroom like sardines. Trump was standing under stage lighting. What does he expect? You don’t get meat-locker temps under those circumstances.

And part of it was Trump’s own fault. The temps in the room probably went up 10 degrees after he opened his mouth. (OK, just kidding on that one.)

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