The writer Adam Davidson would later trace Trump’s ambition for raw dominance to the economics of Manhattan real estate, in which wealth comes from grabbing one’s share of scarce land and extracting income from others as its value grows. The “rentier economy,” Davidson explained, enshrined a zero-sum mentality in which the person (or country) with power gets to set the terms of exchange. Trump assumed—or wanted to assume—that the entire world worked that way.
