"...my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart."- NEVER said by Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, John Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Richard Dawkins, ...
Perhaps Mr. Trump has always felt to be "outside" the inner circle and always pined to be "in," as C.S. Lewis wrote about the urge to be in the “Inner Ring” that drives good people to do bad things:
"It would be polite and charitable, and in
view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a
scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing
against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you
before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be
in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous,
ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take
my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to
your present characters.
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the
choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no
very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing,
will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised
as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or
woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you
hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to
appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of
something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never
understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt
to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at
the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for
gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your
lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It
would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential,
delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know
that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are
drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and
next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit.
It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions,
a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a
scoundrel.
Of all
the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man
who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
...[Yet] if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like,
you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are
indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would
look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is
accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by
the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one
another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It
causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it."
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