DailyExpertNews
—
Ask most politicians why they are running for president and you’ll probably get an answer that sounds like, “I wanted to do the best for as many people as possible,” or something similar.
Donald Trump is not most politicians.
Trump revealed in an interview with Maggie Haberman of the DailyExpertNews for her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” the “why” behind his past and (probably) future bids for the highest office in the country.
“The question I get asked more than any other is, ‘If you had to do it again, would you have done it?'” Trump told Haberman. “The answer is: yes, I think so. Because that’s how I view it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”
OKAY. So, to be crystal clear here: Trump says that if he had to do it all over again, he would run for president again because it made him more famous. That the main motivation for him to run for president was to be known – and it worked.
That’s a surprisingly honest confession — even for Trump. He didn’t even make an effort to go for a more traditional answer, like, I don’t know, helping people or seeing policies that he believed were enacted and implemented. Right down to the purely personal.
Which, knowing what we know about Trump, probably shouldn’t be too surprising. He is someone who is uniquely self-centered and has spent much of his presidency running the government as his own private fief. There were “my generals” and “my army”. The expectation that the Justice Department would pursue its political enemies and act on its behalf.
(Sidebar: Trump, as president, would regularly riff on how much money it cost him to be president. “This thing costs me a fortune, because I’m president,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania in 2019. “It costs me probably from $3 to $5 billion for the privilege of being — and I don’t care — I don’t care. You know if you’re rich, it doesn’t matter. I just want to do a great job.”)
For Trump, the presidency was a means to a personal end: to make him more famous, more marketable, a bigger deal.
That’s how Trump viewed everything that happened to him in his life: an opportunity to get bigger, get richer. Always more, more, more. “The show is Trump, and it’s sold-out performances everywhere,” he told Playboy Magazine in 1990, in one of the most revealing quotes of his life.
Early in his presidency, there was an active debate about whether Trump would bend to the conventions of the presidency or whether he would force the presidency to change its will. Looking back, it is clear that Trump did the latter, pushing his desire for fame and power on the White House for four years.
To think that everything would be different if he is in the job for another four years after the 2024 election is a fool’s errand.