“The message [Trump] was putting out during the election cycle absolutely parroted in a lot ways the message that we were putting out when we were Nazi skinheads trying to recruit people to that cause,” Leek said.
During his transition, Leek recalls, he had an epiphany while sitting in traffic, feeling frustrated in southern California. “We’re all just people trying to get through our lives the best we can,” he said. “Nobody is better than anybody, really, in the grand sense of things.”
Trump's behavior is so easy to understand I'm surprised more people don't get this.
Most people value others based on a number of complex factors about their other's behavior, morals, actions, etc. Trump has a much simpler worldview: If you have ever done anything to harm Trump's ego, you are bad. Otherwise, you are good. I'll grant Trump that at least he gives people the benefit of the doubt.Because Trump's ego is both huge and fragile, it takes very little for a person to fall into the first case. Make a remark critical of something he has ever said, you're bad. Make a joke at his expense — bad. This is exactly why he is constantly talking about loyalty. Loyalty to himself (and loyalty is expliclty one-directional with "You're Fired!" Trump, as his revolving door administration has shown) forms his entire moral sense.If you are bad in Trump's eyes, everything you do is bad, everything about you is bad, and you can never be agreed with. If you're good, you're fine — at least for now until you slip up and end up on his bad side. Note that your actual actions and values in the larger world have no bearing on Trump's assessment of you. The alt-right and white surpremacists are fine in Trump's book because they've never done anything harmful to Trump. Likewise, reality and truth have no bearing on his behavior. He is constantly in 100% ego repair mode. The actual world beyond the boundary of his ego simply does not exist for Trump. The way that press conference shitshow went down is pretty simple:
Then it goes from there. You could write a chatbot that did a convincing emulation of Trump's speech pattern. It's basically:
