Who is Donald Trump? An attempted detached look, to try to sort through that magpie’s nest that is his brain. I’ll write more, because I want to see what, at core, makes the man tick. Not laudatory, not damning. Just facts.

Such an eccentric with such geopolitical power hasn’t been seen probably since Mad King George, to leave the colorful 20th-century monsters like Idi Amin and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, or perhaps good old Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenbashi himself, “Father of All Turkmen”. Once the immediate MAGA threat is over – and it’s looking like we’re four or five months away from a lame-duck congressional term that will go nowhere in a party-line Congress and will see one outrageous constitutional threat and violation of longstanding norms after another on the part of the Administration, to be swatted down early and often by the courts, trying to get things done around Congress – people will be writing about Trump in particular for millennia wondering what made him tick. And in the end, isn’t that perennius aere the biggest tribute of all?

He idealizes a very particular vision of middle America: his childhood 1950s postwar suburbs, the white-picket-fence ramblers with a garage and a lawn, life was more like in A Christmas Story, with Boy Scouts and schoolchildren saluting the flag as it’s run up the flagpole, and shooting club were regular parts of high school and there were no minority voices because there were no minorities to speak of. He didn’t live in postwar white-flight suburbia but his father, as a real estate man, sold it.

Until a far higher age than I had any business doing it, I would take a good mechanical pencil, trace the outline of Europe from an Atlas on tracing paper, then plot out one scenario of conquest, subjugation, treaties redrawing borders, military campaign, what have you with that trusty pencil, basically playing a turn-based PC strategy game without having it occur to me to look for this kind of thing on games (when I did, it was Civ2). Every boy worth his salt either wants to grow up to be Alexander the Great or Jesus Christ. To Trump, there’s not much of a difference, if you hear him speak of his omnipotence and omnibenevolence. Like a boy with tracing paper and a mechanical pencil, Trump wants to play with the maps and expand American territory. You saw this in the Oval Office maps showing Venezuela, the United States, Canada, and Greenland with the US colors superimposed over them. At heart, Donald Trump wants to make the maps look cool and have a tangible conquest of his very own for the history books.

He writes using idiosyncratic initial capitalization – for emphasis, he says, though it seems to be a clear fantastical effort to ape 1776-era typography, which often capitalized words seemingly at random – compare: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

If his views on race are consistent with his other social-issue markers, he generally blames the Blacks for their own problems, stemming from poor character and a lack of initiative, and/or has strong opinions about single mothers (in general), cohabitation, and miscegenation.

He probably links the breakdown of the Black family to unintended consequences of social-benefits policy in the mid 20th century, and with a permanent intergenerational underclass of welfare recipients in programs that cap their assets in the four or low five figures before they no longer qualify, leading many of them to keep themselves poor than take a potential effective pay cut, and holds it against social welfare programs in general.

He divides the world into two great spheres, of civilization (First World) and dysfunctional savagery (Third World). J.D. Vance is more explicitly pro-Western so this is properly his philosophical wheelhouse, but the construct informs Trump’s immigration policies. The notions of civilization (the good countries) and savagery (the shithole countries) are very important and isn’t necessarily any more inherently racial than anything else about the Global South. His international worldview could fairly be described as that of a neocolonialist more than the world order of post-Cold War liberal internationalism that had prevailed during the ’90s and reverberated for decades after. We’re literally in a new world order, bro, which is why things feel so unsettled or in flux right now.