I well remember the Presidential Debates between then-candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. She was a familiar irritant but I'd never paid much attention to him before.
Pacing back and forth, breathing heavily, eyes often closed in concentration, Trump resembled a clumsy sorcerer summoning a malignant djinn to do his bidding, be it to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled clouds and bewitch the swing state voters. It was like watching Sauron versus Old Mother Hubbard as dramatized for the stage by Samuel Beckett.
For his part, President Trump seems to view himself as a radiant Sun blazing at the center of an otherwise insignificant universe populated by feeble planets, the occasional annoying comet, dim stars, fragments of fatuous moons and other worthless space rocks; their only purpose being to reflect his munificent light or be burnt to a crisp by his powerful rays. Either or, it doesn't matter to the Sun.
A paragon of both egoism and egotism, President Trump often reminds me of that privileged clique of capricious British aesthetes who considered everyone else to be mere ephemera. His is the kind of indomitable willpower that bore Julius Caesar across the Rubicon, that animated the arm of Alexander when cutting the Gordian knot, that provides road hogs with the mental carte blanche to cut you off at that busy intersection and cut in line at the checkout counter. Profound or petty, it's all the same to the one and only Number One because it's all about him.
And for that reason, I wouldn't believe anything he said to me except "You're fired."
