Donald Trump once owned up to the force driving him in life — ego.

“Almost every deal I have ever done has been at least partly for my ego,” the billionaire declared in a 1995 New York Times piece titled, What My Ego Wants, My Ego Gets.What 70-year-old Donald John Trump wants now is the U.S. presidency. To understand why, consider the billionaire’s ego not just as mere mortals might see it (an outsized allotment of conceit) but also as Mr. Trump himself understands it (an extraordinary drive for excitement, glamour and style that produces extraordinary success.)

“People need ego,” Mr. Trump has said. “Whole nations need ego.”

Those instincts, after all, allowed a fabulously wealthy businessman to pull off a mind meld with the economic anxieties of ordinary Americans, elbowing aside the Republican A-team and breaking every rule of modern politics on the way to the party’s presidential nomination.“I play to people’s fantasies,” Mr. Trump has acknowledged. And plenty of voters fantasise about bringing some of that Trump swagger to the American psyche.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy has given rise to a nation of armchair analysts with their own theories about the man — He’s a bully. He’s a champion. He’s insecure. He’s a rebel. He’s a narcissist. He’s an optimist. He’s calculating. He’s unscripted. He’s a pathological liar. He sees a larger truth.Mr. Trump himself shies away from self-analysis. But he’s acknowledged that for much of his life, it’s been all about the chase. Whatever it is, he’s in it to win it.

“The same assets that excite me in the chase often, once they are acquired, leave me bored,” he said in 1990 as his boom years were sliding toward bust. “For me, you see, the important thing is the getting, not the having.”That mindset has generated plenty of speculation about whether Mr. Trump really wants to set aside his my-way lifestyle to shoulder the heavy demands of governing.

Mr. Trump bats away such talk. But his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, addressing why Mr. Trump wants a strong and seasoned running mate, says the candidate sees himself as chairman of the board, not CEO, and “needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do”.

Mr. Trump’s unbounded confidence and obsession with winning has been a lifelong constant.One of five children in a well-to-do Queens real estate family, Donald was the brash one.“We gotta calm him down,” his father would say, as Mr. Trump recalls it. “Son, take the lumps out.”

It’s advice he never really embraced.

Mr. Trump followed his father into real estate, but chafed within the confines of Fred Trump’s realm in New York’s outer boroughs. He crossed into Manhattan and made it big before he hit 40.“He was at the top of his own pyramid,” says Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York who is writing a book on Mr. Trump. “Nobody was going to say, ‘Donald, tone it down.’”

Through years of boom, bust and more than a decade of reality TV celebrity on The Apprentice, the deals kept coming and the price tags (and, often, the debt) kept growing as did the hype. Always the hype.Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe recalls a 2005 encounter in the Today show studios, when he confessed to the businessman that he was nervous about making a live television appearance. Mr. Trump’s advice — “Just tell them you met Mr. Trump,” Mr. Radcliffe told Late Night with Seth Meyers recently.

“To this day,” said Mr. Radcliffe, “I can’t even relate to that level of confidence.”

Mr. Trump is not all chutzpah.

A Mississippi man remembers a surprise phone call from Mr. Trump after his father wrote asking for a loan to build a hotel back in 1988. Mr. Trump didn’t offer a loan to the Indian-American small businessman, but did give him a pep talk and some advice.“Trump inspired my father to the fullest when he told him that dad’s immigrant story was wonderful,” Suresh Chawla wrote in a 2015 letter to The Clarksdale Press Register (Mississippi).

And pro golfer Natalie Gulbis tells of Mr. Trump coaching her on how to negotiate equal pay with male competitors.Far more often, though, Americans have seen the tweet-storming settler of scores and hurler of insults.For all the protesters who roil his rallies, Mr. Trump himself is the heckler of our time, who happens to do his jeering from the podium. No one is immune. Not Senator and war hero John McCain, not the disabled, not Mexicans, not Muslims, not even those people who make up a majority of the country (and the electorate) — women.

Aubrey Immelman, a political psychologist at Saint John’s University in Minnesota who has developed a personality index to assess presidential candidates, puts Mr. Trump’s level of narcissism in the “exploitative” range, surpassing any presidential nominee’s score in the past two decades.“His personality is his best friend, but it’s also his worst enemy,” says Mr. Immelman.

The man who has married three times, lives large and offers the opulence of his real estate developments as a metaphor for what he can do for America, in fact has relatively simple tastes, if you are to believe his family and him.Mr. Trump has singled out meatloaf as a favourite meal when he’s at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.“Whenever we have it, half the people order it,” Mr. Trump said in a 1997 New Yorker profile. “But then afterward, if you ask them what they ate, they always deny it.”

On a day Britain got its second ever woman Prime Minister, David Cameron bowed out of Parliament as PM on Wednesday with a poignant echo on his own career, leaving with the line: “I was the future once.”In his final appearance at Prime Minister’s questions in the House of Commons, Mr. Cameron recalled his own famous line from his first appearance in the theatrical weekly sparring session 11 years ago. Then the newly elected Conservative Opposition leader, he taunted embattled Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair: “I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.”

That vision of change launched Mr. Cameron on his way to becoming Prime Minister in 2010 — the youngest in 200 years. Six years later, he is leaving office under the shadow of Britain’s impending exit from the European Union.

Meanwhile, Ms. May’s first task will be to put in place a frontline team that can help her through the challenges of negotiating itHer term is widely expected to champion the cause of women in politics and a series of female Tory MPs are set for prominent roles in her Cabinet. Indian-origin Employment Minister, Priti Patel, can expect a promotion from a junior ministerial role.

China on Wednesday said it could establish a military Air Defence Zone in the South China Sea (SCS), but combined its hardening position on the ruling by an international tribunal on the SCS, with a fresh offer of a dialogue with the Philippines.

China’s offer for diplomatic engagement with the new government in Manila — from a position of strength — followed a firm rejection by President Xi Jinping, of Tuesday’s ruling by the permanent court of arbitration in The Hague. In remarks paraphrased by Xinhua news agency, Mr. Xi said that “China will not accept any proposition or action based on the decision on Tuesday by the South China Sea arbitral tribunal.” Mr. Xi made these observations during a Tuesday afternoon meeting with the visiting European Council President Donald Tusk.

‘ADIZ option on the table’

The contentious mood spilled into a crowded media conference on Wednesday morning. Asked to comment on whether establishing an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) could be part of China’s response to the ruling, Vice-Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said that the option was on table. “On whether China will set up an air defence zone over the SCS, what we have to make clear first is that China has the right to… But whether we need one in the SCS depends on the level of threats we face,” he observed. The imposition of an ADIZ would require overflying planes to first notify China.

By Wednesday afternoon state-media was reporting that civilian aircraft had landed on two new airports in the disputed Spratly islands in the SCS, reinforcing Beijing’s rejection of the ruling.Chinese state-media also railed against the award by the judicial tribunal, which rejected the legality of the Beijing-backed nine-dash demarcation line — the basis of China’s claim to most of the waters of the SCS.

Defiance, nationalistic overtones

Defiance and strong nationalistic overtones resonated in Wednesday’s front-paged commentary in the People’s Daily, the flagship of the Communist Party of China (CPC). “We will not lay claim on even an inch of land that does not belong to us, but neither will we give up even the tiniest parcel of our territory,” observed the commentary.Chinese officials also went into overdrive to rubbish the credibility of the tribunal at Hague. Mr. Liu, the Vice-Foreign Minister, questioned the competence of the judges on the tribunal, pointing out that none of them were Asian, and their understanding of the nuances of the issue was questionable.

In his afternoon briefing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, elaborating on the remarks by the Vice-Foreign Minister, cast serious aspersions on the impartiality of the panel. He asserted that “the arbiter tribunal was financially supported by the former Philippines government,” sharply contrasting it with the International Court of Justice, also situated in The Hague, which was funded by the United Nations.

Some channels see U.S. ‘Pivot of Asia’ cover

Other Chinese media channels stressed that the entire episode was a cover to enforce the US’ “Pivot of Asia” or Rebalance strategy, aimed at the containment of China. A shrill editorial in the state-run tabloid Global Times on Wednesday warned that if the tribunal’s award was implemented, “China would be left with only a few isolated spots in the Nansha (Spratly) Islands without entitlement to any EEZ and could even be deprived of sovereignty of the waters surrounding the islands and islets.”

Yet Mr. Liu was emphatic in pointing to China’s readiness to engage with the Philippines in a fresh round of talks. He stressed that a diplomatic resolution of disputes between China and the Philippines in the SCS through negotiations was the core theme of the White Paper that the Chinese government had released on Wednesday morning.

His call was reciprocated in Manila, where Charles Jose, a spokesman for the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs, was quoted as saying that that the tribunal’s ruling can serve “as a foundation on which we can start the process of negotiations which hopefully will eventually lead to the peaceful settlement of the maritime dispute in the SCS.”