“L’etat C’est Moi”, Continued
When Donald Trump was running for president, many of his supporters cited his supposedly successful business career as a reason for backing his candidacy. This was debunked at the time by those who pointed out his multiple bankruptcies, failed casinos (in gambling, the house always wins, except for Trump) etc. Trump was an unsophisticated person’s idea of a rich man: loud, bombastic, gilded, show-offy etc. His supporters saw the name “TRUMP” in huge letters in big fancy buildings around the world, and assumed that he was running a huge, successful corporation. But the Trump Organization is actually a relatively small, privately-held company, and, as we’ll see, this matters.
As head of the Trump Organization, Donald Trump acted as an absolute dictator. It doesn’t work that way for publicly traded companies such as Apple, GM, IBM, GE, etc. The CEOs of these companies must answer to their Boards of Directors, which in turn must answer to their thousands of stockholders. And they are all monitored by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which works to ensure that publicly traded companies are truthful and transparent, so that investors can make decisions based on accurate information. But none of this applies to Trump; his organization is not publicly traded, so he can act as its dictator (no checks and balances for him!) and can use his “truthful hyperbole”, as he calls it, to shill for his properties so long as he didn’t resort to outright fraud (see Trump University).
Trump’s business model and experience render him particularly unprepared to be President of the United States. He’s used to ruling with an iron fist; that’s why the checks and balances built into our Constitution both baffle and infuriate him. It’s also why he refers to “my generals” and “my Justice Department”. He thinks the Attorney General’s job is to “protect” him, instead of enforcing the law without fear or favor to anyone, including the president. It’s why he thinks he can issue pardons and pull security clearances without going through established processes. It’s why he’s so enamored by, and envious of, authoritarians around the world. He rails against the so-called “deep state” because he doesn’t understand the concept of lifelong Federal civil servants who do their jobs in an apolitical manner instead of acting only for the greater glory of Trump. Recently he complained about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, (whom he appointed just a few months ago) because he disapproves of the Fed’s recent interest rate hikes, even though the Fed is supposed to act independently of the Administration. He also told a reporter from Reuters that if he wanted to, he could take control of the Mueller investigation himself (!), thereby acting as his own prosecutor. I wonder how that would turn out.
President Trump does not believe in the authority of any person or institution in the country to act as a brake on his whims. He thinks the president is the country (“L’etat C’est Moi”), so long as the president is him. He doesn’t believe in an independent press, independent courts, independent Congress, independent Justice Department or independent anything else. Donald Trump thinks that he should be able to run the country just as he ran the Trump Organization; as an absolute dictator. It’s up to all of us to prove him wrong.
thereasonablegrouch 
Bingo in terms of the sentiment and narrative. Would it only be true that he was out there by his lonesome with these crazy notions of what America is, and how it works. Sadly, he taps into something, and that something taps into tens of millions of people who represent the worst and the craziest and the most ignorant of the populace. He also has two other traits worth noting, one is that he is relentless. The population is ignorant and revel in the worst aspects of him. But, if he continues unchecked by the majority of the legislative branch, we are in for deep doo doo. The other trait worth noting is that he is a child of reality TV. He eschews every convention except for the populist sensibility that “ratings” are important. Therein lies the “deep” part of deep doo doo. If it ain’t working for him, rather than going down. there is no telling what he will do as a diversion. He has no ethical constraints hindering him, and to date, his fellow office-holders aren’t seeing the level of consequence you and I seem to see. Hopefully they will before it is too late.