What the hell are you talking about, TFG? You're a reasonable guy - how can you possibly come to this conclusion?
He truly is a blessing. He's public and very vocal, sharing himself and his wonderfully complex self with the world in a way no people like him ever did. You get to see the stuff he talks about on almost every corner if you live in the US, and you don't have to dig deep if you're from the outside, either. If he is to become the President of the United States, the world will surely receive a show of character like none other.
And you will vote for him. You support him, whether you like it or not, because he says what he means, and no candidate has ever been or will ever be as honest and sincere as Trump. You will vote for him, like all the people rallying for his support vehemently, and you will help him become elected as the President. You will also appreciate the gifts he had to give to the world throughout the years of hard labor, such as his thriving travel industry, his massive gourmet sales, his journalism endeavors - every single one of them successful... To say nothing of his political career, where he gets to prove how very smart he is, how cunning an investor he is or how eloquent an orator...
My mother is a special kind of person. She speaks volumes of confidence wherever she goes and whomever she talks to. Whatever she takes to is clarified to her in an instant, so she goes on to issue commands to those who immediately become her subordinates. She's a wonderful psychologist, able to read people in an instant and do what she has to do to make things happen. Full of patience, she was able to raise me, an ungrateful smartass who can't ever listen to her advice, into a person of submission, unlikely to question the wrong things she does, because she does no wrong.
My mother is a narcissist.
The share of a narcissist is to be ever in love with themselves so much that they have nothing but to suffer from it. This self-love, however, is directed not onto the person but onto an image of the person - an ideal, a perfection. As such, their love can never be requited, but the vast gap between those two persons remains regardless, and because of it, the narcissist feels unbelievably insecure about themselves at all times, day or night.
You don't see who they really are, though. Had they followed their true feelings about themselves even for an hour, there would've been no narcissists: they would've jumped off the bridge at the first opportunity.
When we get to talk about ourselves - and we make the opportunity come together if we don't - we usually do it with a bias towards ourselves. Your boyfriend left you? What a bastard! We feel the center of attention at the moment, and at that point, we don't care much for the now-ex, so we don't remind ourselves - and, importantly, the people we talk to - that he was actually a cool guy, too, it's just that him and you had differences. In a moment of pain, we defend ourselves from the possible pain of imperfection that we almost inevitably feel when our flaws are pointed out. It's a natural reaction, and we recoil from it with time, as thing settle and the pain of abandonment fades.
For a narcissist, it never fades, so their defences are at maximum capacity at all times, barring few very special occasions. They will seemingly bend reality to their will in order for it to confirm their words, cherry-picking what fits their vision of the situation to leverage their solution - what must be the best solution available, as they all certainly are. It's an astonishing ability, and one that catches people off-guard a lot of times; the confidence with which they speak the false data is astonishing and, to most of us, enamouring. It makes us feel like the narcissist is the most right person in the room, and those in disagreement with them must certainly be idiots or blind fools.
After I moved to the new apartment in Tomsk, I got rather nasty-looking insect bites all over my body - the kind I can live with but would probably raise a few questions about my overall health from an outside observer. A few days later, my parents visited me, bringing my stuff that I didn't have the comfort to take for a bus trip. When my mother saw the bites, she was shocked and immediately started to panic. She started spitting out theories about what terrible spell might I have encountered: am I allergic to something? (never was, and the obsessed her knows) have I contracted some disease? are those bedbugs?
The last one became her main theory soon. She started rolling on about how they might hide in the matresses, telling me how those pesky buggers might carry terrible diseases and that I must soon call an exterminator if it comes to this... My father and godmother, who came along, chipped in with their own stories of bedbugs and how sneaky they are. My mother suggested that I "set the alarm to, like, 2 AM, and when it goes of, suddenly wake up and look at your bed [for the bugs]" (emphasis hers). Didn't bother her when I told her I've already rebuilt the bed, so I've seen enough of it to tell there were no bugs; she almost went checking, along with my godmother, before I chastized them out of it (the only way to get them - the sisters - away from something, harsh as it is).
I must say: I grew up a rather rational person, despite all the shit happening in the house through my upbringing. The way my mother talked about the bedbugs? How she kept insisting on it and the tone she used to emphasize just how terrible she thought the condition to be? Later that day, I, cursing myself along the way, actually went to check the bed.
Trump will never win the presidential race. Yet, because of people fearing that he might, they don't get to see the prize that they get to receive from this year's elections: to learn about narcissism through its most prominent follower in years to come.
Trump is an excellent example of a painful problem in a lot of people's lives, and yet, people try to treat him seriously. Most people exercise compassion and empathy - not just for persons but for the world around them - involuntarily; for most people, it's not even a choice. Through that, those people - which includes a whole lot of you Hubskiers - try their best to come up with a way to coalesce the ways in which Trump acts with the way they see the world; it's no wonder they - and you - fail miserably. He doesn't give a shit about you: only about himself and the way people see him. He has no backbone, and the faux confidence you see is a mere smoke, unobscuring of the mirror in which others' opinions are to reflect. Trump is, emotionally, a six year old whose puberty kicked in some years ago - and it's not an insult: it's a fact.
So enjoy your time observing the narcissist from the distance. Enjoy - and take notes. When one comes into your life and does their unintentional best to wreck it, you'll be prepared.