Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

by Maggie Haberman

Yet for all the intrigue that is part of the Trump mythos—the talk of his unpredictability or descriptions of him as an agent of chaos—the irony, say those who have known him for years, is that he has had only a handful of moves throughout his entire adult life. There is the counterattack, there is the quick lie, there is the shift of blame, there is the distraction or misdirection, there is the outburst of rage, there is the performative anger, there is the designed-just-for-headlines action or claim, there is the indecisiveness masked by a compensatory lunge, there is the backbiting about one adviser with another adviser, creating a wedge between them. The challenge is figuring out at any given moment which trick he is using.