Donald Trump is a child. A 71-year-old child who looks like an old man with a head of whispy candy hair, but a child nonetheless. That’s why, when faced with any kind of opposition—whether it’s someone telling him to stop playing on his phone or someone developing nuclear weapons—his response is to immediately jump to absurdly dramatic righteous fury, as if he really believes he’s some kind of hero cowboy who can save the world with tough talk. Case in point, Trump recently declared from one of his stupid golf courses that North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it makes any threats against the United States. It’s extremely silly and it might get a lot of people killed, but he doesn’t care because he’s completely out of touch with reality.
That might not be entirely his fault, though. According to a Vox report, the team of sycophants he has surrounded himself with have coddled him into such a well-paddled cocoon that he actually gets two briefings every day that consist entirely of flattering documents. Apparently, he gets folders that are “filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons…admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful,” all of it handpicked to make Trump feel better about himself. It’s basically like someone putting shitty macaroni art on the fridge, except Trump’s macaroni art is so bad that they just throw it in the garbage and buy him a nice toy instead.
While this is all very sad and pathetic, it’s also part of the reason why we’re getting into situations like the aforementioned North Korea thing. Trump doesn’t listen when “fake news” talks about how terrible he is at everything, so when his people pat him on the back and give him a lollipop of compliments, he’s just going to keep thinking people love it when he swings his little nukes around.