Not Just Trump’s John Dean. More Dangerously, Trump’s Trump.

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Donald Trump has met his doppelgänger, and that’s not good for Donald Trump.

Trump’s problem is that Gordon Sondland isn’t like all other government officials. He’s like Trump. He’s unabashedly transactional, with no apparent values except self-promotion and self-preservation. Like Trump, he’s a profane hotelier with a sketchy to nonexistent grasp of history and policy, and is blissfully unconstrained by either. The show of pomp matters to him greatly. And—what’s disastrous for Trump—his loyalty is to himself, not to the national interest, not to his underlings, not to his overlings. Rather than fall on his sword, he impaled Messrs. Pence, Pompeo, Mulvaney, and Trump.

In Sondland, our president has met his match—a witness as narcissistic as Trump is himself. Precisely what Trump deserves.

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