Remind you of anyone?

[Woodrow] Wilson never forgave those who disagreed with him. “He is a good hater,” said his press officer and devoted admirer Ray Stannard Baker.... The French ambassador in Washington saw “a man who, had he lived a couple of centuries ago, would have been the greatest tyrant in the world, because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong.”...

He was clear in his own mind that he meant well. When the American troops went to Haiti or Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic, it was to further order and democracy. “I am going to teach,” he had said in his first term as president, “the South American Republics to elect good men!” He rarely mentioned that he was also protecting the Panama Canal and American investments. During Wilson’s presidency, the United States intervened repeatedly in Mexico to try to get the sort of government it wanted. “The purpose of the United States,” Wilson said, “is solely and singly to secure peace and order in Central America by seeing to it that the processes of self-government there are not interrupted or set aside.” He was taken aback when the Mexicans failed to see the landing of American troops, and American threats, in the same light.

The Mexican adventure also showed Wilson’s propensity, perhaps unconscious, to ignore the truth. When he sent troops to Mexico for the first time, he told Congress that it was in response to repeated provocations and insults to the United States and its citizens from General Victoriano Huerta, the man who had started the Mexican Revolution. Huerta in fact had taken great care to avoid provocations.... [Secretary of State Robert] Lansing said sourly of his president: “Even established facts were ignored if they did not fit in with this intuitive sense, this semi-divine power to select the right.”

--from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan