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Comment by hopfscotch | Hacker News Reader

Trump's only motives are personal profit and keeping himself out of jail. Pompeo is Trump's whipping boy, just like everyone else in the administration. If there were any substantive disagreements between then, Pompeo would be fired, because Trump is an autocrat aspiring to dictatorship.

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>>>Trump's only motives are personal profit and keeping himself out of jail.

If that were the case, his best course of action probably would've been to not run for President.

https://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spendin...

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-forbes-wealthiest-peop...

I'd argue he's narcissistic and his motives may have both been self-serving, but also not strictly financial. I'd also argue he probably doesn't have the foresight to predict weather or not this would end up being good or bad for him financially. It's all speculation at the end of the day, however. Just gotta watch what he does and draw our own conclusions from there.

My characterization of him is similar to yours: a narcissist with a fragile ego and a desire for adulation, with an overestimated sense of his own abilities. I think he has some sort of idiot-savant ability to manipulate the media, isn't REALLY that financially savvy, probably has a genuine desire to "Make America Great Again" (by whatever metrics that represents in his not-very-objective head), but is totally out of his element as a statesman playing The Great Game against the likes of Vlad Putin and Xi Jinping. That last problem is only alleviated by surrounding himself both with respected national security experts (Mattis, Dunford, Kelly, McMaster) and generally listening to his base in attempting to avoid major foreign military conflicts.

Agreed, he’s definitely going to jail. But nobody ever accused him of being smart.

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