Book: Confidence Man

Excerpt from an online article dated 10/06/2023:

When asked to choose between California and Washington in allocating a navy hospital ship during the early months of the pandemic, Trump’s go-to metric was not public need or even party politics but the rationale of a toddler deciding who to share a toy with on the playground: “[California governor Gavin] Newsome said nice things about me. [Washington state governor Jay] Inslee said bad things about me.”

Raised by a monstrous, withholding father, Trump has a bottomless hunger for praise and attention. He doesn’t read (some of Haberman’s sources speculate about a possible learning disorder), can’t concentrate on anything of substance for long, and yet returned insistently to certain crackpot ideas (closing the borders, sending troops to subdue protestors, buying Greenland), no matter how many times his aides pointed out that such actions would be impossible or illegal. He had no grasp of how government works and no concern for the national welfare or even any conception of a value that might transcend self-interest. Whenever anything went wrong, he blamed somebody else.

Trump, that is, is constantly revealing to anyone who will listen his motivations and his inner self (such as it is), summarized by Haberman as “a narcissistic drama-seeker who covered a fragile ego with a bullying impulse.” Yet as soon as he began his presidential campaign, and especially after he took office, the people around him were flummoxed because they expected him to be someone different from the man he kept telling them he is.

At the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Haberman asked a man why he planned to vote for Trump, and the man told her, “I watched him run his business.” [Meaning he watched the TV show "The Apprentice" which was a complete made-up illusion of a real-life business.]