Oh boy, this is going to be fun.
It looks like Democratic strategists waited for just the right moment to give us the full portrait of Trump. Too soon, and the GOP might wrest the nomination away from this “sociopath”, as the ghost writer of his best known book, The Art of the Deal labeled him. But in addition to the withering New Yorker article about this ghost writer, also released last night was a piece on BuzzFeed by McKay Koppins, whom, we learn, is credited as the person perhaps most responsible for goading Trump into running for president.
The Koppins article shows Trump as someone pathologically desperate to be accepted by high society, but unable to close the deal.
An excerpt or two:
But for Trump, the ultimate insult came at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. “Everybody wanted me to make a keynote speech,” Trump told me. “People were writing me thousands of letters and emails, all going crazy.” Yet despite the pleading of these vast letter-writing multitudes, the Romney campaign turned him down. Trump was indignant. “What, I wouldn’t say the right thing?” he told me. “Hey, I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I did great.” Anyway, as consolation, the campaign said he could produce a short video to show at the convention — but in the end, even that got scuttled.
Fast forward to this election season, when Trump almost cancels his big presidential announcement at Trump Tower (with the down escalator and the Mexican rapists comment):
Trump’s advisers took turns making appeals to his ego, to his patriotism, to his lust for TV cameras — anything they could think of. What finally seemed to do the trick, according to Nunberg, was floating the notion that his haters might get the final word on him in the history books. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in this election,” he recalled telling Trump. “But no matter what, they’re gonna write about it a hundred years from now. And they’re never gonna be able to say you didn’t run.”
Trump adopted this as a kind of mantra in those final, anxious days before entering the race. “They’re never gonna say I didn’t run,” he recited to one aide after another. “They’re never gonna say I didn’t run.”
www.buzzfeed.com/…
You simply have to go read the whole thing. The one-two punch of this article and the one in the New Yorker, I believe, are designed to throw Trump off his game at just the right moment.