The night Trump flopped

For a carnival barker used to getting insult-free whoops and hollers from his fans, Saturday night at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC musta been hell for the 45th president.

Indeed, when Donald Trump tottered onto the stage to jeers and boos, he wore the rictus grin of a crash test dummy being strapped into a Smart car before being shot at a concrete wall.

His efforts to woo the “other” libs went down like the Hindenburg airship, which is to say fast and in flames.

Promises to appoint “a libertarian” (just the one?) to his government were met with shouts of “Liar!”.

Other insults included “wannabe dictator” and “panderer” — amid general laughter and jeering.

As the ex-president is nothing if not a sore loser, he responded to the taunts with a clipped “That’s nice” before mocking the Libertarian Party for routinely getting only 3% of the vote every four years. Which, as Dale Carnegie might have warned him, is not the way to win or influence … voters.

Just to be clear, Joe Biden would not have done any better on Saturday night had he accepted the invitation to attend. The enemy of my enemy is not, in this case, my friend.

Maybe the sitting president is cleverer or maybe he has better advisers. Either way Biden 1, Trump 0 for optics this night.

Trump did score some cheers for promising to pardon the online drug merchant Ross Ulbricht, who is now serving a life sentence and has become something of a battle standard for libertarians.

The moral gymnastics of getting that past his evangelical base would, however, be television worth watching.

It was Trump’s shortest speech ever. After 34 minutes he tottered offstage, seemingly more frail than just half an hour before. A weak fist bump in the air and he was gone …