Transcript: Trump Erupts in “Mad King” Tirades as Presser Goes Awry

Sargent: Right. This is the, this is the, on unslakeable narcissist theory of Donald Trump, basically, which is that he sort of exists in this universe, which where he, has sort of discovered that if he bluffs his way through life, he can make people act as if He’s really the real thing, a world historically great figure or the best, the greatest real estate developer in New York or whatever thing he’s best at at that very moment. But underneath it all, there’s no satisfying, this kind of howling void inside him.

Beutler: Yeah. And so what he’s doing is—I don’t think that his, like, increasing assertion of dictatorial power is something that he has convinced himself is righteous and, like, the way things ought to be under the Constitution. He’s just power mad. And he has the Supreme Court behind him, and he knows when he does things that are illegal or unconstitutional—even if he doesn’t quite understand them in those terms—but that he’s being predatory and he’s abusing people, and he’s trying to extort them or blackmail them or whatever—is that it’s going to take months, if not years, for the Supreme Court to finally sort out, like, the legality of each of these individual moves.

And that, in the meantime, the Supreme Court—because they’re in his pocket—is very likely to let the policies stand while litigation works its way through the court. And so he can basically end the First Amendment at the Pentagon, and he can abuse federal spending power to crush federalism in New York, make it so that New Yorkers don’t have a republican form of government, and really harm basically everyone who lives in New York and leave them in a harmed position for months, if not years, before he gets told, you can’t do that.