All Of Trump's Actions Are Just To Feed His Huge Ego

Presidents in the past have generally tried to do what they thought was best for this country. They have not always been right, and some of their actions did not accomplish that goal, but they thought they were helping Americans.

Donald Trump is different. He doesn't care what is good for the country or its citizens. He only cares about himself, and every action he has taken has been to feed his own inflated ego. He does only what he thinks will make him look good, regardless of what it does to the country.

Here is just a part of how Max Boot describes this in The Washington Post:

Politics at its highest level has always been a realm of healthy egos — and of personal ambitions cloaked as public needs. Yet even the most driven politicians usually recognize the need to serve — or at least appear to serve — some cause greater than their own self-interest. There are few profiles in courage, but even politicians who act out of sheer expediency are usually troubled by occasional pangs of guilt.

President Trump is therefore a unique, or at least very unusual, specimen of homo politicus. He shows no sign of being aware of any interest that he should serve other than his own. Doing the right thing, for him, is simply doing whatever he thinks will benefit him the most. As Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump, “He has no principles. … Donald is out for Donald, period.” The president’s picture should appear in the dictionary under the word “solipsism”; he is the Platonic ideal of the type.

Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in his memoir: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.” . . .

If there are limits to what Trump will do in service to his own ego, we have not discovered them. He will, as the Senate Intelligence Committee just confirmed, eagerly accept election help from Russia. He will try to blackmail Ukraine into helping him politically. He will urge a boycott of Goodyear — a company that employees 63,000 Americans — because a slide show counseled its employees not to sport “MAGA attire” at work. He will subject millions of Americans to delayed mail deliveries — resulting in dead chicks and missing checks — to prevent anti-Trump voters from casting ballots by mail. He will even push — according to the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security — for the federal government to stop giving emergency aid to help California battle wildfires because that state did not support him.

What makes Trump truly extraordinary is not just that he acts so unethically. It is that he is so open about it, because he can’t conceive there would be anything wrong with anything he does to help himself.

Thus he admitted that he is starving the Postal Service of funds because “that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting.” He will keep insisting until the day he dies that his phone call with Ukraine’s president was “perfect” because what’s wrong with using military aid to promote his own campaign? And of course he calls accusations of collusion between his campaign and Russia a “hoax” — he clearly doesn’t see anything scandalous about inviting foreign election interference on his behalf. He so often says the quiet part out loud, because he doesn’t know that what he’s saying is wrong.

That makes him a uniquely dangerous president: a man with no principles — save the imperative of self-promotion — but with the awesome power of the federal government at his command.