THE UNKNOWN SELF-IN-CHIEF:

To discuss Trump's formative years, as well as the current state of his presidency, I spoke by phone recently with Marc Fisher, a senior editor at the Washington Post and the author, with Michael Kranish, of Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President. Fisher spent hours interviewing Trump for the book and has continued to analyze him in these early months of his presidency. [...]

Isaac Chotiner: What surprises you most and least about Trump's presidency thus far?

Marc Fisher: For a guy who takes great pride in being a provocateur and being unpredictable, he's remarkably consistent. The great satisfaction of covering him as president is that his behavior tracks the main themes of his life prior to the presidency quite beautifully. This is a guy who really does not change much. In fact, in one of our early interviews, he said, "I'm pretty much the same guy I was when I was 7 years old." The patterns of behavior through his life are shockingly consistent.

What are those?

It's everything from his unitary focus on himself and what's good for his bottom line to his very solitary, lonely nature as a man, to his willingness to run over and destroy anyone he sees as being in his way. He is quite consistently someone who likes to make mischief and thinks of himself as a jokester, and yet he's also someone who deeply believes that he can manage and fix just about anything.

Probably one of the most important aspects of his personality is that for Donald Trump there's really no tense other than the present tense. He doesn't think terribly much about the future, and he also doesn't at all acknowledge that the past exists. I think he almost uniquely, in my experience, doesn't really experience the past in his day-to-day life. When you ask him about things that took place earlier in his life, it's almost as if they come fresh to him every time you mention them.

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