The Orange Devil in the White House

Like all narcissists, he doesn’t like to be told if he’s screwing up, so he surrounds himself with people who don’t tell him.

The more Trump fixates on an opponent he vanquished months ago and whines about vote tallies and crowd sizes, the more he seems small and insecure.

The more he loudly insists on Putin’s charms, the loonier he sounds.

The more he defends the odd duck Michael Flynn, saying he fired him only because Flynn misled Mike Pence about talking sanctions with the Russian ambassador before Pence went on “Face the Nation,” the more it raises the question: Why didn’t Trump himself tell Pence when the White House counsel told him?

And the more Trump decries America’s lack of innocence in the world relative to Russia and turns journalists into whipping boys and targets of hate, the more he sounds like a thuggy dictator himself.

“When Trump was a kid, he was obsessed with intimidating other boys,” D’Antonio says. “Prior to a ballgame he would ceremoniously eat an orange as if it was an apple, biting into the bitter rind and chewing up the whole thing. The whole idea was to psych out his opponents.”

As presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminded me, the previous gold standard for a president showing contempt for reporters at a news conference was Nixon during Watergate in 1973, when he said just after the Saturday Night Massacre: “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.”

Trump got into another megalomaniacal “Me the People” swivet Friday, tweeting the “FAKE NEWS media” was “the enemy of the American people!” So Trump is even using the rhetoric of Lenin? Putin is lovely and the press is the Evil Empire?

Beschloss riposted with this tweet: “On December 1972 tape, Nixon told Kissinger, ‘The press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy.’”

By suddenly calling his own scream-of-consciousness press conference, Trump was out to prove that he — not Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway or Stephen Miller — is the top salesman in the office. Only he can close the deal.

“It was true Trump,” D’Antonio said. “He thinks confidence is more important than competence and attitude matters more than aptitude. Others may be exhausted by the frenzy. You can see it in their drawn faces and pained expressions. Donald is energized by the fight. It also explains why he expects others to accept a bashing and be fine with him the next day.”

When Trump was corrected on the obvious whopper that his Electoral College vote was the “biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” his only defense was, “I was given that information.”

Spin is the bitcoin of Washington. But Trump is in another dimension. He has distorted the truth for so long, he now seems routinely untethered from reality.

As Trump biographer Tim O’Brien puts it, “He’s the emperor of chaos.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 19, 2017, on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Trapped in Trump’s Brain. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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