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“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Set aside issues of Donald Trump’s temperament and intellectual capacity. Stipulate  that, as is regularly speculated in the media, he shows symptoms of a malignant  personality disorder; that there is ample evidence he possesses a sociopathic penchant to lie in the face of contravening facts; and he is practiced in the demagogue’s art of exploiting the passions of the mob.

Instead, concentrate on another prominent feature of the Trump character, namely that he holds to a worldview that sees all encounters as transactional, confrontations where two parties sit down to bare-knuckled negotiation. These interactions are competitions which yield a winner and a loser and the winner takes all. Not only must Trump win, but he must earn outsized acclaim for his victories, and wide recognition for his accomplishments, real or imagined. In the same vein, he is compelled to disparage his opponents, as if belittling them makes him larger.

Calling Donald Trump a gracious winner would be delusional. 

Evidence? The name-calling he engaged in during the campaign- “Little Marco”, Lying Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”. Obsessively over-stating the size of his inaugural crowd. Touting the impressiveness of his Electoral College numbers. His zealous preoccupation with demeaning the Obama Administration and undoing as many of his predecessor’s policies as possible. His five months in office have presented us with daily examples of this personality trait.

Consistent with his zero-sum approach, it is evident that Trump prefers to personalize all conflicts, to take a “me-against-her-or-him” approach. He apparently believes that he will always prevail in these one-on-one interactions, and that he possesses superior powers of persuasion. Two news items that passed by without much media comment in the last year caught my attention: During the campaign, it was reported by someone who knew Trump that he was uncomfortable dealing with the Japanese: they invariably arrived at meetings with a team and denied him the opportunity for the personal one-on-one haranguing he felt was his strength. More recently, during his trip to Europe, he supposedly offered to exchange personal cell phone numbers with some of the European leaders, apparently so he could by-pass standard protocols. He seems to function on what I refer to as the “three B’s” principle- bullying, bluster and BS.  He is not constrained by facts, policies or rules. He is either ignorant or disdainful of ideas and events. His sole interest is prevailing.

With his Administration on the brink of a full-blown crisis, Trump’s heavy-handed attempts to derail the various investigations into l'affaire Russe have only served to exacerbate an already vexing situation. When the firing of FBI Director James Comey blew up in his face, Trump’s reaction was to attack Comey’s credibility- in effect, to reduce the entire issue to a referendum on whether he or Comey was more credible. Given his history, this was not a surprise.

But it also not a surprise that Trump’s zero-sum approach has created the very circumstance which portends his own downfall. Begin with the Trumpian view that this is strictly a Comey-Trump dust-up. “Discredit Comey and I win” appears to be the Trump thinking. First-order miscalculation: James Comey is a lawyer, a Washington insider, was Deputy Attorney General and, most recently, Director of the FBI. Donald Trump ran a family busines;. what worked in New York City real estate does not easily translate to the Presidency.  He has nothing in the way of the skill, experience temperament, intellect or character to match Comey. To this point, he has been out-maneuvered: Comey testified this week that he engineered release of his contemporaneous notes with the hope of prompting the appointment of the Special Counsel.

Of course, Trump still has a Republican Congress that, bent on enacting its retrograde agenda, has been sluggish in investigating the various issues that have arisen from Russian interference in last fall’s election. This situation is also fluid: Either Trump’s declining poll numbers- and the spectre of a disaster in next year’s midterm elections- or any incriminating outcome from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will doubtless spur GOP legislators to begin jumping ship.

All a result of Trump’s failure to grasp the reality of his situation. Begin with an unrealistic assumption or assessment and the odds are that subsequent decisions will be unrealistic, too. So the second-order miscalculation is the idea that this a winner-take-all struggle between him and James Comey, or even between him and Robert Mueller (Trump’s surrogates have begun whispering about the possibility of Trump having the Special Counsel removed).

Clinging to this formulation, Trump failed to recognize the formidable nature of the forces aligned against him. As I have written previously, he kicked the hornet’s nest by picking fights with the media, the intelligence community and the FBI. The man who today stated that “Never has there been a president, with few exceptions — case of FDR, he had a major depression to handle — who has passed more legislation and who has done more things than what we’ve done,” is seemingly oblivious to the peril in which he has placed his Presidency. He believes that his bluster will suffice.

President Trump is staring at the negative side of the zero-sum equation and does not see it.