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BY KIM SHINKOSKEY

Those who are casting about looking for a template from the past to explain the mindset and policy blitz of our current president are going to be frustrated. There is none.

America has had two presidents in the past accused of being dictators—Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt. But Mr. Trump is taking things to a whole new level.

Mr. Trump has revealed much of the inner workings of his mind with the Gaza imbroglio. It is clear now that he sees the Western world as his own personal sandbox. He is so powerful he can claim ownership of foreign lands for real estate development purposes, and he can claim entire peoples as pawns that he can move on a massive chessboard when it is his turn to move.

This is exactly the legal ownership philosophy of kingship in the Middle Ages. When the powerful Norman King William conquered Britain in 1066, he claimed personal ownership of the entire countryside and everything in it “by right of conquest.” He handed out great big tracts of land to his fawning generals and thereby started a system of aristocratic “nobility” whereby various levels of barons and dukes and other titled aristocrats could legally pass on property to firstborn sons forevermore without ever having done anything to work or develop the land. Mr. Trump may keep all the new lands he claims for himself, or he may dole some of them out to his sons or his followers, even though “titles of nobility” are outlawed by our Constitution.

Those lands in the Western sphere that he cannot own and populate or depopulate directly, he believes he can control—like, for example, Greenland and Canada, and likely soon Mexico.

If this kind of mentality had manifested in any president before the 21st century, the people of this country would have been sure to see to it that he was carted out of the White House in a straitjacket. But our people today, at least the uneducated among us, see him as just one of us.

He likes to go to football games and play golf. He has a wandering eye when his wife is pregnant and unavailable to him. He likes nude models and porn stars and would prefer to have them as trophy possessions rather than just photographs on the wall. What’s not to like?

There is not a health care research agency or an aid agency vital for humanitarian purposes at home or abroad that he believes is off-limits for his off-the-cuff chessboard moves. There need be no substitute put in place to handle their disappearing services. Mr. Nixon moved federal programs back to the states in the form of a block grant program, but not so Mr. Trump. What is important is the visible manifestation of his total power to evaporate stuff that bothers him or his followers or that can be made to look like he is getting promised stuff done. The effect of his moves on ordinary, unwealthy Americans is of little to no consequence to him.

Mr. Trump’s new Department of Justice now recommends that the indicted mayor of New York be allowed to skirt his crimes simply because the mayor reminds him of himself, indicted by evil New York prosecutors. In effect, he is giving the mayor the island of Manhattan as his own personal fief, no matter how he handles it. This is a presidency motivated by personal needs and personal grievances, not by the policy needs of the people or the ethics of the Bible or of business school professors.

All that is needed is a skinny pretext for action. For example, Mr. Trump overturned the terms of the hard-won hostage release plan in the wink of an eye simply because three of the Israeli hostages came back… well… skinny. He saw that as sufficient pretext to demand all remaining hostages be released “by Saturday noon” in a supreme show of power over not only a friend like Israel but an enemy like Hamas. He said that if this is not done in a timely fashion, he will unleash one of his faithful generals, Netanyahu, to continue the U.S.-enabled rubble-making program forthwith.

This is exactly the pattern of policy destruction that he used pre-inauguration when he killed the hard-won bipartisan border legislation of Congress. No amount of effort, intelligence, or humanitarian accomplishment is too much to be overturned by a simple wave of his magic wand.

(Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama*.)*