OUR SINGLE MINDED PRESIDENT

Recently, the Trump administration has been defunding Planned Parenthood while the president himself has been repeating (and tweeting) the lie that Democrats now support abortions that will kill newborn babies.  This is all coming from a man who once described himself as "very pro choice".  He also once refused to give a straight answer to columnist Maureen Dowd when she asked him if he had ever paid for a woman's abortion.
Also, a recent New York Times article revealed that Trump's boasts of building a wall on the border during the campaign was really just a simple mnemonic device developed by his campaign team to keep him on track during his rambling speeches.  Now the president has declared a state of emergency after shutting down the government in an attempt to build that mnemonic device.  This is happening even as some of his own properties are being exposed for hiring undocumented immigrants.
Trump's recent conversions on these two beliefs are not the result of a carefully examined reimagining of his moral ideas, because it appears that the president does not have any.  He does, however, have one simple guiding principle that appears to have formed at his birth: that he, Donald Trump is a epic, near godlike figure who must be given constant adulation and loyalty.  And he is perfectly willing to abandon any previous feelings he may have had to get that adulation.  This single minded desire to be worshipped has changed the modern Republican party to the cult of Trump, in which fealty to him no matter what is the only requirement.
There is no better example of this than in his upcoming meeting with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un; after initially criticizing Jong-un, Trump has now decided that they fell in love, because, of course, Jong-un started showing Trump the respect he thinks he deserves.  No matter how the talks go, Trump will come away bragging of a major breakthrough and taking credit for making the world safer.  Because now it's not enough for him to be president, he also thinks that he deserves to win a Nobel Peace Prize.  This is mainly because Barack Obama was given one when he was president, and Trump's childish game of one upmanship demands that he be given one too.  Yes, it's not enough for Trump to have promoted the lie that Obama was Kenyan for years, and then attempt to counteract everything Obama did as president, he thinks that he also deserves the same award too.  He wants the award so much  that he even recently boasted that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wrote a letter promoting him for the prize, which Abe is now refusing to comment on.
The sad part of this all is that Trump's single minded desire to be worshipped and awarded means that he will probably except any concession from Jong-un no matter how token or meaningless it will be, so long as Trump can claim a victory.  Meanwhile, North Korea will almost certainly hang on to all of its nuclear and chemical weapons and continue to be a horribly repressive government.  Ironically, Trump's desire for a peace prize may actually make the world less safe.
This is the danger that America has lived with for almost three years now; that a messianic egotistical leader who only cares about himself is running the country with no concern for anything other than his own self promotion.   How scary is this?  A recent CNN headline asked a serious question:  "What if Trump refuses to accept defeat in 2020?', the fact that we are wondering about this in a democracy illustrates just how much trouble we're in.