Make-believe isn't the whole story or even the start of the whole story (only of the public part), but let's take a good look around on this level while we're here.
Trump ambulance-chases international conflicts in hopes of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That's the only reason he tries to become a peacemaker. It shows in his impatience for the principals to do his bidding as soon as he has inserted himself. Whereas serious peacemakers work long and hard to achieve real solutions, he wants to swing by and pick up credit in short order. A make-believe solution will do in a pinch, because he only cares about the personal distinction of appearing as a peacemaker. It's pathetically obvious. He lacks the self-discipline to hide it (assuming he understands how appearance defeats appearance). Anyway, going through the motions is all he's capable of.
Trump manufactures economic crises with a busy shell game of tariff threats, postponements, impositions, removals, adjustments — in an attempt to make it seem that he has tackled a problem and wrestled it to a satisfactory conclusion or thereabouts. It's the same with his improvised one-man diplomacy: a period of shadow-boxing followed eventually by a show summit that ends in acceptance of the status quo and then a claim of unspecified gains. The intervening turmoil is his childish idea of legerdemain.
Trump distills reality into numbers, a form in which he thinks he can get his hands around it and manage it as he pleases. Television ratings. Crowd sizes. The employment data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The sheer numbers of people deported, regardless of cases or consequences. Unruly numbers must be replaced, and well-behaved ones must be maximized. Even normal politicians may have such numerological tendencies; Donald Trump lets them rip.
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Now let's go back to the beginning of it all and see what it tells us about our present predicament.
Because of the disastrous circumstances in which he was raised, Donald knew intuitively, based on plenty of experience, that he would never be comforted or soothed, especially when he most needed to be. There was no point, then, in acting needy. ... The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss. But it also kept him from figuring out how to trust people enough to get close to them.
— Mary L. Trump PhD, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
Evidently the neediness itself didn't come to an end; nor was the development of a rigid personality accompanied by the development of anything else, including a serviceably thick skin. The suit of armor is hard, but it's compromised by chinks through which the little mind inside must watch a superior world go by while trying hatefully to suck it in. The mind that survives within Donald Trump is ruled by frustration, resentment, and vanity much more thoroughly than most minds are. This is not armchair psychologizing, but compulsively revealed truth. Donald continually certifies it in spite of himself. His mind has been crippled in most functions other than tactical cunning. Whatever the cause may be, he has physically grown to adulthood without acquiring so much as a grown-up vocabulary or the grown-up recognition that he's neither an all-round prodigy nor the hero of every story. Read the letter he wrote to the president of Turkey in 2019 and consider that he couldn't tell how ridiculous it made him look; otherwise, he wouldn't have sent it. Consider his assertion that if he'd found himself in the vicinity of a school shooting he'd have run in to stop it, even unarmed. Consider all his boasts of intuitive expertise. Consider his naked vulnerability (“No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet. No, you're the puppet."). Consider his love of shiny objects and his indulgence in more ice cream than he gives his guests. This is an arrested infant who exhibits his infantile mentality to the world, either unaware that it disgraces him or unable to help himself.
Such a person is not going to act with sustained rationality or attention to anything external. Donald has no politics. No philosophy. No values independent of his needs and appetites. No grand scheme outside the canvas of an awaited full-length portrait, Great Man with Grand Scheme. His incantation of "Make America Great Again" is a pander designed — with minimal effort — to attract the discontented to himself so he can feed on them. He doesn't care about America the objectively-existing country, into which he was born and out of which his soul will fly to its reward. He cares only about America the domain of Donald Trump. If it doesn't last a day longer than he does, that's all right; just so it keeps him comfortable in the meantime.
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With that, the whole story has been told. Since the beginning of it all, its subject has not developed; only expanded to fill more space. Where Donald Trump's psyche holds sway, everything else loses the status of reality. That's always been obvious, but it's so absurdly simple, so degradingly petty, that one keeps looking here and there for evidence of something more. It's no use. Anything more is merely ornamental.
