DOES TRUMP REALIZE THAT OTHER PEOPLE EXIST?

Jamelle Bouie is trying to understand why President Trump doesn't prepare for easily imagined outcomes.

Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America’s Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America’s European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support....

What’s striking is how familiar this pattern feels. The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force.

Bouie thinks this is an extreme form of narcissism.

Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds....

And so, whenever other people do act of their own accord, both the president and his administration find themselves flat-footed.

Is that it? Yes, more or less -- but consider this NBC story, which is getting a lot of attention:

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

... the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

We know that Trump has a seemingly limitless need for narcissistic supply -- he needs people around him to proclaim that he's great and brilliant. These videos of "stuff blowing up" in Trump's glorious war obviously serve the same purpose as the elaborate statements of praise Trump receives from Cabinet members and others on a regular basis.

But while I believe these nothing-but-good-news sizzle reels distort Trump's view of the war, I believe what the NBC story also tells us:

The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.

He must know that some things aren't going splendidly. He clearly understands that the war has upset global markets, otherwise he wouldn't be talking so much about negotiating a possible peace deal, even if Iran says that those negotiations aren't taking place. On immigration, he can obviously see that his crackdown isn't playing well, otherwise he wouldn't have fired Kristi Noem and relieved Greg Bovino of his duties.

Trump -- a lifelong believer in Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking -- grasps that other people exist, but he believes that they should ingest the news Trump-style, with a strong emphasis on his successes. In reference to Trump's Iran news digests, NBC tells us:

... the videos are ... driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing....

Trump isn't completely oblivious to the existence of other people. He needs to spend time in his bubble of narcissism, but one of his other primal needs is the need to hate everyone who disagrees with him.

Of course, that resolves to narcissism, too. Trump believes that if the media covered the war the way his video briefings do, everyone would love what he's doing. Therefore, his struggles in the polls are the media's fault. Similarly, he's angry at Congress for not passing a version of the SAVE Act with anti-trans provisions attached; he's convinced that passing the bill in this form will guarantee Republican victories in every future election, which means that if the bill doesn't pass, or doesn't pass exactly the way he wants it, then he's not responsible for Republican election losses in the midterms.

Yes, Trump understands that other people exist, and he knows that some of them don't think the way he does. But he regards that as a mistake that needs to be corrected for his benefit.