“This is all very consistent with the man I worked with 30 years ago,” Bruce Nobles, the former president of the Trump Shuttle, told me. “He’s very competitive and wants to always win, and if he thinks he can’t win, then by definition there must be something wrong with the system, because otherwise, of course, he would win,” Nobles said. “He believes that, if for some reason he doesn’t get what he wants, it’s not his fault—it’s some other corrupt system that’s keeping that from happening.”

Back in 1990, when he owed his bank lenders billions of dollars, Trump blamed the overall economic downturn instead of acknowledging the litany of his own reckless decisions, “saying, ‘OK, well, you run the building, you run the debt, you run the airline, you run the Plaza,’” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me. And he made sure that his plight was every bit their plight, in a sense faulting the system, then distorting the system—then (ab)using the system to survive. “He’d say, ‘Hey, if I fail, everybody fails,’” said Marcus.

“When he was deeply indebted with bank loans he couldn’t repay,” added O’Brien, the biographer, “he basically said that he would just blow up the banks and leave them hanging and walk away from his debts—when they needed him to play ball, so they could rationally dispose of the properties he used to control. And once he realized that they needed his involvement, he began playing with fire—like all 7-year-olds do.”