If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson famously observed, then maybe Donald Trump really is the "stable genius" he has proclaimed himself. Certainly our president's vanity and narcissism are such that he'd enjoy seeing himself on Emerson's list of the great and misunderstood giants of history: "Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh." At least, Trump might appreciate that if he knew who even half those people were. Or if he could read.
There are other, more plausible explanations for Trump's behavior, of course. Such as that his greatness is entirely in his own mind, and that he barely recognizes other people or the outside world as real. He is a damaged, impulsive man-child whose pathologies distill many of the worst pathologies of the nation that (more or less) elected him. So many judgments of Trump — from those who love him, those who hate him and those who have ridden along and made their peace with him for various reasons — were built on the faulty premise that he could be predicted or controlled, or at least that he was guided by some recognizable ideology.
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