From the ever-excellent Jason Kottke, here's a video and article about Trump admiring yet (seemingly) knowing the faults and foibles of the title character of the all-time classic Citizen Kane.
And of course he doesn't really get it, but he seems to possess a really, really, truly beautiful and fantastic self-awareness for a hot second there. By far the most interesting explainer of Trump I've read over the past 15 months (good god).
Trump either fails to see the moral emptiness at Kane’s core, or else he does, and it doesn’t strike him as exceptional. Either way, however we spin it—wherever we draw the line of his self-delusion—Trump is admitting that he’s every bit as hollow as Charlie Kane; every bit “the empty box” (as Welles called him); every bit the liar and narcissist and demagogue.