Posted Friday night, December 29, 2017.
Inspector Chrome is speculating about the motives of a serial killer he and Hercule Poirot are chasing, but it sure sounds like he’s describing a certain President of the United States, doesn’t it?
“I think I’ve got the psychology of the case fairly clear. Dr. Thompson will correct me if I’m wrong. I take it that every time A B C brings a crime off, his self-confidence increases about a hundred per cent. Every time he feels ‘I’m clever---they can’t catch me!’ he becomes over-weeningly confident that he also becomes careless. He exaggerates his own cleverness and everyone else’s stupidity. Very soon he’d be hardly bothering to take any precautions at all. That’s right, isn’t it, doctor?"
---from The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie.
But as I’ve said, he’s an all too common type. Which is why it still baffles me that so many supposedly savvy political journalists didn’t recognize him from the get-go and so many still seem to be expecting him to turn into somebody else.
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