Once upon a time, Donald Trump said he would support the Republican nominee even if it wasn’t him.  But like all fairy tales, that was not true.

Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday night that he no longer vowed to support the Republican nominee if it isn’t him, despite a loyalty pledge that all Republican primary candidates signed last year.

“No, I don’t anymore,” Mr. Trump said at a town hall forum on CNN when prompted by the moderator, Anderson Cooper. “No, we’ll see who it is.”

[…]

Last September, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, asked Mr. Trump to sign a loyalty oath at a time when he left open the possibility of bolting from the party and running as a third-party candidate. Mr. Trump said he would sign, so long as all of the other candidates did the same. So they all did.

But Mr. Trump, amid intense efforts to derail his march toward the nomination in a race in which he has a large lead among delegates to the Republican National Convention, said at the forum that he did not believe he was being treated fairly.

“I have tremendous support right now from the people,” Mr. Trump said. “I have many more delegates than him,” he added of Mr. Cruz.

I don’t think there’s anyone out there, including Mr. Trump, who actually believed he would keep his word.  We knew that he would come up with some imaginary excuse to break the promise if he thought he wasn’t being treated fairly, and to him “fairly” means not having anyone anywhere say anything negative about him or treat him like all the rest of the candidates because as we all know, they’re nothing but losers.

If by some fluke someone else like Ted Cruz or John Kasich or Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney is the nominee, then Mr. Trump will take his show elsewhere, the GOP will splinter, and the Democrats would step over the corpses and keep the White House and quite possibly retake the Senate. (That’s assuming they don’t keep up their tradition of blowing an easy win.)

This is simply his way of trying to blackmail the GOP into handing over the keys to the clown car so that he can be the one to drive it over the cliff in November.

It’s not blackmail; it’s the art of the deal.