All right, it’s time to talk about the "John Miller" thing.
Raise your hand, America, if you were even the least bit surprised at hearing that during the 1980s Donald Trump would (apparently frequently) pose as his own PR department, using a series of fake names like "John Miller" and "John Barron" to call up reporters and enlighten them as to the inherent wonderfulness of Donald J. Trump.
No—put your hand down, you. You're not allowed to be surprised over this. This may literally be the most Donald Trump thing Donald Trump could possibly do, and we're talking about a man who thinks so highly of himself that he has undertaken a decades-long program to alchemize his own still-attached face to match the gold trim of his sinks. Of course Donald Trump is his own best publicist. Of course Donald Trump calls people up pretending to be an admiring employee of Donald Trump, greatest and kindest and richest employer ever. The greatness of Donald Trump cannot truly be conveyed merely by Donald Trump himself: It requires a legion of admirers, and none of those other unpleasant little roaches in the building could ever be trusted to admire him properly—even when talking about his own affairs and divorces.
Interviewer: Do you think there’s any fear that Marla will spill everything at all or — ?
John Miller: It doesn’t matter to him. He truly doesn’t care. I’ve never seen somebody that’s so immune, that he gets immune to, you know, some people would say you got bad press three or four months ago. Now, he’s starting to get good press where I don’t know what you call this but this is a big press.
But I’ve never seen somebody so immune to — he actually thrived on the bad press initially. [...]
I can tell you there was never any talk of marriage from Donald’s point of view. I can also say that Marla would’ve liked to get married, obviously, but it was just something he didn’t want to do.
Truly, he is a human cartoon. And we're very lucky that there's no video footage of this event, because we all know that there is a very high likelihood that Donald Trump was not wearing pants during these episodes of pseudonymic self-congratulation.
It's not even surprising that Sue Carswell, the interviewer of Trump-cum-Miller in the above exchange, now supposes that Trump might have even leaked these interview tapes himself. He might, as John Miller supposes, actually "thrive" on the bad press. He might on the other hand think they do him credit, by proving that he really could man an entire presidential administration himself if given the chance. He would task John Miller with being his press secretary; John Barron would run the department of defense; John Baron-with-one-n would print the new money.
He. Is. A. Cartoon. And the more of this that we hear, the easier it is to understand just why a certain segment of what used to be the "conservative" movement wants to see him do this to the presidency. They no longer merely distrust their own government—they hate it. They want it treated as carnival. They want it destroyed.
Update: