He just can’t help himself, even when his demanding, baby-bully impulses, like putting his name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, are clearly bad politics.

However unpopular and unseemly, these antics nevertheless put him once again and ever-more at the center of attention, which, in the new political math, or at least Trump political math, creates something like a zero-sum effect: people hate him more, and his polls suffer, but by his sheer omnipresence, and will to dominate, his core supporters don’t love him less. And since the Democrats are weak and disoriented, he can, by just continuing to be Donald Trump, often eke out a win.

Back to he just can’t help himself: Someone’s name—as it happens John F. Kennedy’s—was on the Kennedy Center which meant, ergo, it was a naming opportunity. With an acute, indeed obsessive, awareness of names on buildings, Trump couldn’t help himself from thinking having his name there too would be a personal achievement—one that, conveniently, he could order to happen.

Weeks into his second term, full of new determination to do everything he didn’t do in his first term, he made himself the chairman of the Center’s board and appointed Ric Grenell, one of his persistent henchmen, and an oft-lieutenant of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the executive director. Grenell had no experience working with cultural........

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