This piece in the conservative Never-Trump Bulwark has an interesting angle on Trump’s solipsism:
By the time the president completes his typical Sunday rage-tweeting, it is often difficult to pick what was risible and separate it from what was laughable, especially since, in the Venn diagram of Trumpism, those circles are converging. But last Sunday’s show featured a claim that should be remembered precisely because it is so easy to forget. Reacting to a story about his pandemic work habits that appeared in the New York Times—a newspaper he has made a public display of saying he does not read but to which he responds with suspicious frequency
Never mind the “people say” device, or the fact that the only thing more unpalatable to Trump’s critics than him binge-watching Fox & Friends might be what he would actually do if he spent more time in the office.
The real problem is his rush to the superlative: He is eager to measure his actions in historical terms. (The least plausible of Trump’s claims are often made with the most rhetorical force. See “genius, stable.”) The issue is not the fabulism itself—tall tales are part of politics, even if Trump tells, to use his dialect, the tallest ever—but rather the nature of it. Trump operates outside of time in an argot that dissolves the shared memories on which a republic depends. He lives in an eternal now. This may be fine for individuals—or at least for adolescents who have not yet grasped the fleeting nature of man’s existence. But it is an insufficient foundation for constitutional government.
Yeah.
He goes on to catalog some of the more egregious examples and there are hundreds more. And he explains why it’s so important for a president to have some sense of historical perspective. It’s quite interesting .
I will just add that this is the personality trait I loathe the most in Trump, followed closely by the blaming and whining about how “unfair” everything is. Put these together and you have a profoundly immature personality, someone so stunted that he truly believes he is the center of the universe, like a toddler. That’s not hyperbole. It’s actually the case.
And again, what makes me so stunned, even to this day, is not really him — it’s the people who obviously admire these personality traits. I can’t get past it. Are nearly half the people like this and I failed to see it all these years? Or are they so witless that they can’t see how pathologically incompetent this makes him?
I don’t know, but I suspect I will spend the rest of my life pondering that question. I’ll never get over it.