Last year I ruminated in this column about the meaning of Donald Trump’s obsession with royalty and the prerogatives of kings, not least their right to rule unfettered by constraints such as congress. Huge “No Kings” protests were sweeping the country. Supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor warned “the president is now a king, above the law”.

Trump’s king fetish was about a lust for power but also a manifestation of his widely diagnosed narcissism, a self-belief that drives a conviction in his God-like self-importance and entitlement. And infallibility.

Nothing better, I wrote, illustrates his regal folies de grandeur and legacy obsession than his “dream” to join the line-up of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. A local politician has prepared the necessary legislation. And now he is building in Washington a gigantic triumphal arch, to dwarf even the French original. Asked by CBS News what this was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself: “Me.”

We’ve moved on too. Now the president, encouraged by some of his most sycophantic supporters, has cast himself as the Son of God, aspiring to divinity or at the least to a divine mandate or mission. This is a logical outcome of his narcissistic personality disorder, after all, often known as the God complex.

Donald Trump briefly felt........

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