The thing about arrogance, or at least Trump’s version of it, is that it needs constant feeding, a steady stream of new targets to dominate and conquer. At first, he ran for president just as a vanity project, not expecting or even really wanting to win. Then he won. Then, once he actually became president, he needed to be the greatest ever, in his mind. “This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” he said in a December 2022 video introducing his “digital trading cards.” In his first term, he needed to dominate his enemies, but as many have observed, there were still some guardrails around him. In the second, with the guardrails gone, he’s extended his reach from the hated deep state to universities and law firms.
He started to run out of domestic enemies, so it was only a matter of time before he turned his gaze outward to the world. This is the precise reason why a person had to be gullible in the extreme to believe him when he said he wouldn’t be starting any wars. He had to start wars. His insatiable arrogance, his grandiosity, made it inevitable. At some point, conquering the United States would not be enough.
“What I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity, desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence. Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and destruction it causes.”
