Donald Trump doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren't, and that's one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama's birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality.

For anyone with the traits - of feeling himself victimized, of seeking to be the strongman who resolves everything, yet sees truth only through his own self and negates all other truth outside of it - is bound to become more malignant when he has power. Power then breeds an intensification of all this because the power can never be absolute power - to some extent it's stymied - but the isolation while in power becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more dangerous because of the power.

People with what we call mental illness can indeed serve well, and people who have no discernible mental illness - and that may be true of Trump - may not be able to serve, may be quite unfit. So it isn't always the question of a psychiatric diagnosis. It's really a question of what psychological and other traits render one unfit or dangerous.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.

As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.