McKay Coppins: “In the story Trump tells himself, he is a man continually under siege by a cabal of jealous insiders determined to destroy him. This conspiracy of saboteurs has taken different forms over the course of his career. When he was an outer-borough real-estate scion trying to make it in Manhattan, the bad guys were the city’s sneering blue bloods who didn’t invite him to their parties and rolled their eyes at his theatrics. Then it was the bankers who refused to lend him money, and the media snobs who made fun of his short fingers, and the party hacks who refused to support his presidential-primary bid, and the ‘deep-state’ bureaucrats who tried to subvert his administration.”
“These ‘haters,’ as he likes to call them, loom large in Trump’s imagination. Every failure he suffers is their fault; every success he enjoys is in spite of them. And nothing—not even his initiation into America’s most exclusive fraternity—can seem to ease his fear that there exists an even more elusive inner sanctum where his enemies are plotting to keep him shut out.”
“This odd form of presidential status anxiety gnaws at Trump even in the best of times.”
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