Before he got to D.C., Trump was used to media that could be bought, sold and bartered with. He is not built for this hostile environment and it shows in his deteriorating psychological state. Even though he’s in the safest space of all, he’s not in a safe space.
Trump has always been obsessed with looks — his own, men’s and women’s. One of his favorite phrases is “Here’s the beauty of me.” He walks through life as though he’s the judge in an ’80s swimsuit contest — even with his own wives and older daughter. “She’s got the best body,” was his typical refrain about Ivanka…
I gave Trump the benefit of the doubt after his comment on Megyn Kelly about “blood coming out of her wherever” when he claimed he meant her nose. But later, a longtime Trump associate told me that Trump had practiced that line before he said it on CNN and that it was meant to evoke an image of Kelly as hormonal.