I watched a chilling clip from the Daily Show recently. It wasn’t particularly new. It was from an episode that aired earlier this summer, but it frightened me, and made me think about the different versions of the narrative that might come to be. The interview was with Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. The important part of the interview described a meeting with Trump in which Trump brought out a document, purportedly from a historian, that ranked him as the most powerful person who has ever lived. This was reported in the New York Times in an article about a book that described the meeting, and in the book itself. It turns out that the document wasn’t created by somebody that most people would consider a qualified historian, but was instead created by a friend of a friend, who is more what most of us would call a history buff. Nevertheless, the description of Trump as being more powerful than the people on this list explains a lot about how he sees himself, but raises plenty of questions.

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