It’s everything from his unitary focus on himself and what’s good for his bottom line to his very solitary, lonely nature as a man, to his willingness to run over and destroy anyone he sees as being in his way. He is quite consistently someone who likes to make mischief and thinks of himself as a jokester, and yet he’s also someone who deeply believes that he can manage and fix just about anything.
Probably one of the most important aspects of his personality is that for Donald Trump there’s really no tense other than the present tense. He doesn’t think terribly much about the future, and he also doesn’t at all acknowledge that the past exists. I think he almost uniquely, in my experience, doesn’t really experience the past in his day-to-day life. When you ask him about things that took place earlier in his life, it’s almost as if they come fresh to him every time you mention them. [...]
I think he has a remarkable capacity for denial, and I think there have been very few occasions over the course of his life where he has been slapped in the face with his failure, whether it was his bankruptcies, the failures of any number of his businesses, the failures of two marriages. In each case, he has an almost admirable ability to move through life as if those losses and failures hadn’t happened, and to portray them not in a crass political spin sort of way but in a really gut-level, deeply felt way as things that didn’t bother him and things that he didn’t even acknowledge. [...]
Trump doesn’t really have the capacity to enjoy things in the way that most people think of that word. You never see him laughing. He’s not a terribly optimistic person, as we saw in the campaign. I think he relishes the authority, the power, and above all the stature of the position. He loves the trappings of his office, but there’s really no evidence that he loves the day to day of most of the things he does, with the exception of dealing with the media. He has this reputation that he’s cultivated of being tough on the media. He’s certainly staking a lot of the rhetoric of the administration on bashing the media, but there’s nothing he loves more than talking to the reporters and working the press and working his image. That really is more of a source of satisfaction to him than anything that might have to do with policy, which bores him to tears.
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