Now that I’ve read the entire transcript of @nytmike’s Trump interview, a few observations:
1. Trump speaks a lot like a child does. Lots of focus on who likes him, who loves him, who is his friend... his biographers all emphasize his deep desire to be loved & it comes through.
1. Trump speaks a lot like a child does. Lots of focus on who likes him, who loves him, who is his friend... his biographers all emphasize his deep desire to be loved & it comes through.
2. Trump repeats whatever he is fixated on over and over again. I counted 15 “no collusion” repeats, sometimes two or three times in a single paragraph. And he keeps returning over and over again to the election and how he managed to win via the Electoral College. He’s fixated.
3. Trump things being president means he can do whatever he wants. He has an autocrat's impulse, and believes literally everyone in government, from the attorney general to every member of Congress, essentially works for him, owes him loyalty, and must "come to him" for mercy.
He literally adopted a "Godfather" phraseology to all but say Democrats could have avoided blue state tax hikes via SALT if they had "come to him" to plead for his largesse. It's a combination of the impulses of 1. and 3.
4. Trump thinks he is still the star of a TV show, and that the media has the power to decide who wins elections, based on ratings. Seriously: 
5. Trump invents his own reality, and then states that everybody else believes his version of reality too. And since he is so transparent, it's hard to argue that this is a strategy, rather than a form of self-delusion or just stubborn refusal to accept what is real. 
There are literally no Democrats who believe that. None. But he repeats that over and over in the interview.
I've never observed anyone who is more precisely like his biographers have described him. And Trump's biographers have, to put it mildly, not been kind. He lives inside his own reality, where he is part beloved autocrat/dictator and part main character in a never-ending TV show.
It is absolutely stunning that this person is president of the United States.
I'm not sure, by the way, what this means for Democrats. Trump clearly assumes that they HAVE NO CHOICE but to come crawling to him to do infrastructure, DACA, and inexplicably, to make a new, *better* healthcare (he specifically says "not Obamacare."
He clearly thinks this will happen, and that somehow magically, they will "do bipartisan." That's his actual phrase: "do bipartisan." Not "do bipartisan legislation," just "do bipartisan." He thinks it naturally will happen.
If Democrats go along, it will only feed his grandiosity. If they don't, it feeds his rage and opens the black hole of vengeance inside him, which he could take out on them, vulnerable populations, maybe other countries (war is still not unthinkable...) I just don't know.
But it's absolutely stunning that this is what's happening. But it is what's happening.
Here's the transcript. Enjoy. nytimes.com/2017/12/28/us/…
