Unsettling Trump admission predicts ‘caustic’ next two years: biographer

Two decades ago, on a weekend drive to his New Jersey golf course, Donald Trump told his biographer which public figure he admired, and the writer now says the answer offers an unsettling preview of the president’s next two years.

Trump picked legendary film director Orson Welles, recalled “TrumpNation” author Timothy O’Brien in a new column for Bloomberg.

“He was like this great genius that after twenty-six, never ever did it,” Trump said, according to O’Brien. “He became totally impossible. He thought everybody was a moron, everybody was this, everybody was that; if he had a budget, he’d exceed it by 20 times and destroy everything.”

“He became impossible,” the future president added. “I loved that.”

O’Brien wrote that the answer passes for self-awareness from a man who also thinks he’s surrounded by morons and has no problem being impossible, particularly in an empowering position like the presidency.

The journalist and author argues the anecdote matters now that Democrats have won both chambers of Congress, making Trump a lame duck. The 80-year-old president briefly struck a conciliatory tone after the results, telling Fox News early Wednesday he thought he could “work with everything,” congratulating Democrats and not questioning their victory.

“He could have left it at that, but, of course, he didn’t,” O’Brien wrote. Trump added, “They’re in control, but they’re really not in control,” and reminded Democrats that he can still veto their bills.

O’Brien wrote that a cornered Trump has usually lashed out, through his careers in real estate, casinos and reality TV and through bankruptcies, and that’s likely the version the world will see for the rest of his term.

Introspection, O’Brien noted, has never been one of Trump’s traits. On the same drive, Trump dismissed the idea of seeing a therapist.

“I have found I am not a disbeliever in it,” he told O'Brien. “But I look at reports that psychiatrists have by far the highest rate of suicide than anybody — that means they’re pretty f--ked up, and I don’t have the time for it.”

O’Brien expects Trump to fight Democratic investigations as “witch hunts” and look overseas when he’s blocked at home. He raised the possibility that Trump could offer Taiwan as a “sacrificial lamb” to China, keep leaving Ukraine to “dangle,” or escalate in Iran rather than pursue diplomacy.

O’Brien argued Trump thinks about the world and himself "cinematically" rather than strategically, and that he craves an audience. He pointed to a remark Trump made to supporters last month, in which the president said he could say “the stupidest things” and they’d still clap.

“It could be a very long and caustic two years,” O’Brien concluded.