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"I am the Chosen One" -- Oh, it was a joooke!

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Not long ago, the President of the United States, talking to a scrum of reporters, defending his (insane) policy with regard to US/China trade relations, and in that context said "I am the chosen one," and looked briefly to the sky before resuming his discourse.

It was an intense moment. It is worth marking the intensity as the world skids out of control and even crazier news pushes that bit aside. I'm doing the POTUS an undeserved favor in the paragraph above by using all lower case letters for the phrase "chosen one," although he said it as if he mean, "the Chosen One."

In a country where a majority of the citizens are Christians the phrase has a pretty specific meaning, and the look at the skies rather confirms it. This remark makes Donald Trump our first President of whom we can say that his self-image isn't just dynastic. It is metaphysical.

After a bit of blowback, a couple of days later, Trump was asked to expand on what he meant by the phrase. His response?

"You know exactly when I meant. It was sarcasm. It was joking. We were all smiling, And a question like that is just fake news."

The original comment sounded like that of a narcissistic sociopath. The later explanation is that POTUS was only jokingly pretending to be a narcissistic sociopath.  In much the same way, I gather, that the Pesci character in GOODFELLAS was jokingly pretending to be an out-of-control gangster. It doesn't mean that his character really was a ...

uh, never mind.
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