William F. Buckley Jr. Exposes Donald Trump

Look for the narcissist.

Hat tip to Pat McGuigan for the story & source
The following excerpt comes from a 2000 column in Cigar Aficionado:

"  The most obvious target in today's lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.   But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something.
  So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents--midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War--had little to do with a bottom line.

William F. Buckley Jr.

  So what else can Trump offer us? Well to begin with, a self-financed campaign. Does it follow that all who finance their own campaigns are narcissists?   At this writing Steve Forbes has spent $63 million in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Forbes is an evangelist, not an exhibitionist. In his long and sober private career, Steve Forbes never bought a casino, and if he had done so, he would not have called it Forbes's Funhouse. His motivations are discernibly selfless. Yes, you can make the point that under a flat tax he would pay less in federal income tax, leaving the critic with the problem of figuring out how many decades it would take Forbes to earn back, in reduced taxes, the $63 million he has spent on his campaign.

Further reading: 5 Noted Clinicians Confirm The Narcissist Behavior Of Donald Trump - Vanity Fair

A Draft Campaign? 

  The other way to enter a political contest in which there is something less than a draft movement working for you and you don't have the means to finance it on your own, like Trump and Ross Perot and Steve Forbes, is to opportunize on a political anomaly. If there is something approaching a dead heat between the two candidates of the major parties, go for the independent ticket.   Now this is (in my judgment, colored no doubt by personal experience) not exclusively the behavior of the demagogue. In New York State 35 years ago, the Republican Party had become a zygotic twin of the Democratic Party. In 1965 I ran for mayor of New York City having no prospect whatever of prevailing. It could therefore be said of my political venture that I was an exhibitionist and a demagogue: except that what I said, and the measures I advocated, were in large measure what many voters did not wish to hear (accounting, perhaps, for the paltry 13 percent of the vote I won). "