I came across a quote recently from an interview Donald Trump gave to Playboy magazine in 1990, at a time when he was a cause of chaos and corruption merely in the world of New York real estate, rather than the world at large.

In the interview, Trump was asked whether he was ever satisfied with what he had accomplished in business; his answer was a resounding “No”, an answer framed not by a sense of vision or purpose, but by something like its opposite. “I’m never self-satisfied,” he says. “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it’s all a rather sad situation.” When the interviewer asks him whether it is life or death he finds to be the sad situation, he says: “Both. We’re here and we live our 60, or 70 or 80 years and we’re gone. You win, you win, you win and in the end, it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. But it is something to do – to keep you interested.”

It hardly seems necessary to point out that Trump is ill-suited to being the most powerful politician on the planet, and we certainly don’t need to go riffling through musty old copies of Playboy to substantiate this claim. I personally find it difficult to imagine anyone being suited to such a role, and, if I could, it probably wouldn’t be someone who wanted it. I am thinking here of the science fiction writer Douglas Adams’s indelible formulation that “those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it”, and that “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job”.

Trump is surely the most extreme test case of this proposition in our time. The nihilism evinced in that interview answer – the idea that all that counts is winning for its own sake, and that in the end even........

© The Irish Times