The parallels and the differences between the Very Stable Genius's brand of narcissism and that of his predecessor, the Most Equal Comrade

Incisive Daren Jonescu blog post in which he gets to the heart of this subject:

In response to my post about President Trump’s “Tariff Man” boast about China, a great friend notes that Trump’s public statements (primarily tweets) almost invariably emphasize the first person singular, a mannerism he shares with his predecessor, and one very much in keeping with both men’s entrenched narcissism.

I would only qualify that reasonable comparison with the observation that if there is one difference between Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” narcissism and Trump’s “Look at me, look at me” narcissism, it is in the motivating attitudes.

Obama really seems to believe, without any doubt, that he is cut from a superior cloth, and that everyone would agree with that self-assessment without hesitation. Trump, by contrast, is a classic example of short man syndrome, or small hands syndrome in his case. Unlike Obama’s insouciant smugness, Trump’s tone is always suggestive of one begging his audience to believe he is as impressive as he says he is. He boasts of being great friends with all of the world’s tyrants partly because he truly admires their power, but also because he needs you to know he has really, reallymet and talked personally with all those important people, and they liked him! So you should too!

He also looks at the parallels and differences between each president's cult following:

Obama’s following was motivated by a combination of ideological sympathy and illusions of cultural hipness. Those quasi-fascist posters of Obama that became popular iconography and T-shirt logos throughout his “reign” were a perfect crystallization of those two sides of his support base.

Trump’s supporters are more of a personality cult, in the literal, unqualified sense. Beliefs, trendiness, and so on have little or nothing to do with his base. They love him because he is Trump, period.

So for Obama to test the limits of what his followers will support, he has to couch his proposals in ideological rationalizations, even if they are mostly based on emotions, e.g.,“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Trump, meanwhile, would have his base’s support regardless of what he proposed. In other words, if Obama came out one day in favor of eliminating the minimum wage and reducing corporate tax rates, most of his followers who were actually paying attention (rather than just wearing the T-shirt) would express outrage and possibly even abandon him, at least if such anti-Marxist proposals became a pattern. By contrast, if Trump came out and said he favored socialized medicine, gun control, appeasing North Korea, and high tariffs, his base would say, and of course has in fact said, “Thank God for Trump,” and would viciously smear anyone who questioned the validity of these policies as mentally ill, or as “an Obama (or Hillary or Jeb) lover.”

Which faction is more dangerous in practice? I guess that depends on what Trump actually proposes, since there seems to be no limit to what his gang of hypnotized monkeys will swallow for him. 

A bit later in his essay, he gets into the matter of how "conservatives" who got on the Squirrel-Hair train and never looked back have treated him for refusing to guzzle the Kool-Aid. That mainly played itself out at The American Thinker, a site to which I have also contributed.

A large portion of the more active members of Trump’s base took over a very popular conservative website where I used to be a regular and successful contributor. They would pour in by the thousands to call me (and other popular regulars who refused to turn off their rational faculties for Trump, such as Steve McCann and C. Edmund Wright) vicious and outrageous names, and accuse me (and the others) of all the usual Trumpy lies of convenience. Many of them, strangely, were people who had read my writing for years and flattered me with plenty of generous compliments. But the moment they boarded the Trump train, and discovered that I hadn’t jumped on with them, that was it. I was persona non grata, and everything we had ever agreed on was irrelevant. I was one of “Them” now — a cuckservative, a RINO, a progressive, a Jeb supporter, an America-hater, an establishment hack, a Hillary lover, and the rest of the song and dance.

I know them. And I won’t pretend they are something they are not (i.e., reasonable Americans), just because we might agree on a few policy issues once in a while. To suggest that my “assumptions” about them — which are essentially Trump’s assumptions, as noted above — helped him to become President is both insulting and absurd. I tried to talk to them respectfully and seriously, back when it mattered. They spat in my face, as they do with anyone who tries, and would certainly have ripped me limb from limb if they had thought their orange idol willed it. So I gave up — on them and their lost souls, that is.

Yup. Distortion and obfuscation is how the throne-sniffers roll when confronted with substantiation for the claim that the VSG is - well, what he makes plain that he is on a daily basis.

Regarding Jonescu's overarching point, consider what this says about post-America: three of our four most recent presidents have been pathological narcissists.