Trump: The Epitome of a Spoiled Child (and Why They Shouldn't Rule Countries)

Why shouldn't a spoiled man-child rule a country, let alone America? Because his utter disregard for the common good -- What is it to me? -- can only end in ruin. He's positive it won't be his, because when was it ever?

Trump's essential pose -- the shrug -- epitomizes his empathy
toward people who aren't him.

Donald Trump blew up politics -- and its essential quality, polity -- when he was convinced by his least empathetic advisors that we shouldn't care a whit for people from "shithole countries." So what was an uncharacteristic civil negotiation on a Tuesday became a "I want my Wall, I want my Wall!" temper tantrum by Thursday. Now, a week later, he's willing to blow up the government.

Why? The answer is clear to Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post:

President Trump apparently had an affair with a porn star while his model wife was home with their newborn son. No surprise there. Keeping the affair out of the newspapers before the 2016 election reportedly cost him $130,000, around a measly 0.004 percent of his claimed net worth of $3.1 billion — nothing to him. The fact that you might be unsettled by this news also means nothing to him. Trump is impervious to scandal and immune to social censure. He is insulated from consequence by power, money and fame in a way not imaginable to the ordinary person. He is the freest man alive.

Americans like to think we invented freedom, but we really only extended it to an absurd conclusion in the person of Trump.

...

Trump is at his most furious when the exceptions arise — say, when complicated political maneuvering in Congress subverts his whims, or when the Constitution stops him from exercising autocratic caprice. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it,” Trump said of meddling with the Justice Department and the FBI in November. In May, he mused about eliminating legislative procedure and the filibuster, dismissing it all as “an archaic system.” Those checks on wild, wanton exercises of individual power must seem old-fashioned to Trump indeed, and they do echo ancient fears about the limitless exercise of the human will. James Madison had read his Aristotle, and Aristotle was right in the end about what the unbound will can do to a polity. But what did they know? When you’re a star, you can do anything.

Sounds about right -- and despicably wrong. In the end, he's grabbing us all by the pussy. It's what he does.