THURSDAY, JAN 19, 2017 08:17 AM CST
FILE - In this Jan. 13, 2017 file photo, President-elect Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. Premiums and the number of uninsured would soar under a Republican bill scuttling President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul that Congress passed last year, lawmakers’ nonpartisan budget analyst estimated Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, in a report underlining the GOP’s risks as it starts a fresh push to dismantle and replace that statute. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)(Credit: AP)
Donald Trump’s biographers: He’s narcissistic, belligerent and deeply fears that he’s illegitimate
A collection of professional Trump soothsayers arrived at some troubling conclusions about the president-elect
SKIP TO COMMENTS
FILE - In this Jan. 13, 2017 file photo, President-elect Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. Premiums and the number of uninsured would soar under a Republican bill scuttling President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul that Congress passed last year, lawmakers’ nonpartisan budget analyst estimated Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, in a report underlining the GOP’s risks as it starts a fresh push to dismantle and replace that statute. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)(Credit: AP)
Biographers who have studied Donald Trump extensively all seem to agree that his leadership style is going to be defined by his narcissism, belligerence and deep fearof his own illegitimacy.
In a joint interview with Politico on Wednesday, Trump biographers Gwenda Blair, Michael D’Antonio and Timothy O’Brien gave some very interesting observations about the president-elect.
“This is all about him completely dominating the news cycles — the use of Twitter to distract from any real questions, emphasis on loyalty, vituperation toward anyone he sees who is disloyal or doesn’t toe his line, and his emphasis on conflict, the notion of setting people against each other,” Blair said regarding the president-elect’s post-election behavior. “Now it’s countries against each other. It’s news organizations against each other.”
The Trump experts all agreed that his combative behavior — picking fights with intelligence agencies, Rep. John Lewis, Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin — has also been quite predictable.
“I also think that he’s the same old Trump and emphasizing this combative quality and wanting to fight with just about everybody,” said D’Antonio. “I’ve been asked lately about why he seems to have affection for a guy like Putin. And the thing that I’m afraid of most, based on what I’m seeing, is that he seems to want to be the same style of leader, where he intimidates people. He tries to shame them. The most shocking thing I think he did was note all of his enemies in his New Year’s message. The idea of a president actually having even the thought of all of these enemies in his head as he’s welcoming the new year and greeting the country is almost crazy to me.”
Blair argued that these traits can be traced back to his childhood.
There’s a fusion, I think, of his childhood, an emphasis on being combative, being killers — as his dad famously instructed his boys to be — but also, I think, his own competitive nature, and then his grasp in early adulthood that being a bully and really putting it to other people and not backing down often works. He also had his church background telling him that being a success was the most important thing and that got fused with the sort of “You want a crowd to show up, start a fight,” P.T. Barnum-type thing early on in his career. And then Roy Cohn as a mentor, a guy who stood for cold-eye calculus about how bullying people works. And you put all of those pieces together, that he’s been doing this his whole life, and I don’t see a single reason for him to back down. He’s going to go full blast ahead with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment