Trump and I, Regressing

Donald Trump, in 1999, was interviewed on some TV show, and was asked, for some reason, about the North Korean problem. He might have been running for president at the time. One loses track. Trump's voice sounded clear back then, and had not yet acquired the roughness it has now. Same goes for his thinking. His responses in 1999 were clear, articulate, cogent, well conceived. He strongly indicated that diplomacy, not threats or military action, was the solution to North Korea. He encouraged people to look at the situation from all points of view, including the North Korean. Now, in response to basically the same set of circumstances, president Trump's comments seem juvenile, thuggish, and given without any deep thought. The question: what happened? Why did he became a vindictive, thoughtless, brutal person? I always like to think that as we age, we mature mentally, become wiser, more thoughtful, better. That might not be the case. Something happened to Donald Trump along the way, during the past couple of decades. He became bitter, angry, striking out at good people. Remember the phrase "lying Ted"? Ted Cruz didn't deserve Trump's treatment of him during the primary campaign, and all of the people trump attacks, including James Comey and Jeff Sessions, don't deserve it either. And now, in place of empathy and diplomacy, Trump gives us fire and fury, smugly, struttingly, arrogantly. If he thinks his fire and fury will be the greatest in human history, he forgets World War Two. I notice something similar within me. The more I age, the less I like other people. The anger, the greed, the pettiness, the history, in which over one hundred million people died in combat during to last hundred years. We are no different today. Like Trump's benefactor Robert Mercer, I prefer the company of cats. My tendency to anger has not abated as much as I would like, and the wisdom I so like to believe I have acquired sometimes seems absent. Do we actually regress with age? Does the pain of growing old derail our intellectual progress? Maybe Donald Trump and I should regress to our youth, that we might progress mentally.