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The emperor of the world

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Jane Mayer’s portrait of Donald Trump via an in-depth interview with Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, is must reading. What emerges is a genuinely terrifying picture of a narcissistic sociopath with severe attention deficit issues to boot:

“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

Schwartz sees Trump’s presidential run as the logical endpoint of the junkie’s search for ever-higher doses for his fix:

Schwartz reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trump’s story, not his own, but the more he worked on the project the more disturbing he found it. In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as “draining” and “deadening.” Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d spent decades as a tabloid titan, “the only thing left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he would.”

Trump emerges as a compulsive liar and an ignorant, utterly out of control narcissist, who reads nothing but his own press clippings (it’s doubtful that he’s ever read a book as an adult). He does watch a lot of TV though.

In a perfect denouement to Mayer’s story, Trump took the time in the midst of the convention that is crowning him king of the Republican party to order one of his lawyers fire off a ludicrous cease and desist letter to Schwartz. In his typical fashion, Trump had his mouthpiece bluster about Schwartz’s supposedly defamatory statements, without bothering to specify any, while making farcical demands that the lawyer, assuming he has a triple digit IQ, is well aware are both legally frivolous and have zero chance of drawing any response other than derision.

As a few Russian novelists have observed, people can get used to anything with time, but we shouldn’t get inured to the astounding fact that this disgraceful joke of a human being is now the Republican candidate for president of the United States, and therefore has a non-trivial chance of becoming the most powerful man in world.

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