Donald Trump’s tremendous love
Stay up to date with our new daily update, The US in brief, and our presidential poll tracker. Read more of our coverage of the US elections of 2024. Pretty much by definition, presidents are not normal people. But even by their abnormal standard Mr Trump is an unusual character.
His detractors like to point out that he had a head start in life as the son of a millionaire real-estate developer. They may not give him enough credit, though, for how through daring, determination and a certain ethical flexibility he willed himself into becoming a billionaire, a flamboyant celebrity, a reality-television star and then the president—how, like F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Donald Trump “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself". His insistence on this conception overwhelmed the scoffers at his candidacy eight years ago, bulldozed most Republicans into believing he did not lose in 2020 and may now persuade Americans to return him to the White House.
Biographers of Mr Trump have recounted how, as he discovered he could dominate and bamboozle others, he acquired some contempt for them as well. Once he became known for his wealth people would claw at him for favours.
He marvelled, as a candidate in 2015, how easy it was to woo voters with the slightest gesture. Wayne Barrett, a New York journalist who was probably the closest student of Mr Trump’s rise, fall and fragile recovery into the early 1990s, writes in “Trump" that people who worked for the mogul longed for him to find love but “did not really believe he had the capacity for it." Mr Barrett quotes one such person as saying Mr Trump was “unaware of his own tragedy" and then continues, “As they saw it, his deeply ingrained remoteness was so much a part of his
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