CONFIDENCE MAN

The poster child for self-absorption is revealed to be even worse than we thought.

Much of what New York Times reporter Haberman tells us isn’t new, unless it’s a novel observation that Donald Trump is so in love with the sound of his own voice that he’ll say anything—including, occasionally, the truth. So it is that some newsworthy items emerge: Trump all but admitting that the documents found at Mar-a-Lago were sent there deliberately (“Most of it is in the archives, but…we have incredible things”), for instance, but also falsely insisting that on Jan. 6 he was not glued to the TV despite numerous reports to the contrary (“I was having meetings. I was also with Mark Meadows and others. I was not watching television”). It’s likely that things are going to be uncomfortable around the Thanksgiving table when his daughter and her husband read that “Trump frequently told Kelly and other aides that he was eager to see Jared and Ivanka depart the White House.” Melania might not be happy, either, to know that Trump’s greatest worry about running for president was “the women,” pointing upward to the Trump Tower penthouse and adding, “I’ll get in trouble upstairs.” The most useful part of Haberman’s lucid, justly scornful account is her linking of Trump's actions as president to his actions as a New York wheeler-dealer. He yearned to be accepted by the city’s elite and reacted in bitter anger when he wasn’t; as Al Sharpton shrewdly observed, “everything was transactional.” Repeatedly bailed out by his father and the banks, Trump was largely a failure as a businessman and, as Haberman deftly chronicles, mostly for the same reasons that he failed as a president: refusal to accept responsibility, unite contending factions, or listen to anyone but himself.

A damning portrait of narcissism, megalomania, and abject failure—and the price the country is paying in the bargain.