I have referred here to Donald Trump’s blaming Ronald Reagan’s 1987 tax reform for the first of Trump’s four business bankruptcies, and how very un-Republican that is.

That comment came in a Playboy magazine interview. Trump’s first big Playboy Interview was in 1990, when he made this interesting statement:

Sometimes you sound like a Presidential candidate stirring up the voters.

I don’t want the Presidency. I’m going to help a lot of people with my foundation-and for me, the grass isn’t always greener.

But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?

Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican-and that’s not because I’d be more Republican-and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows. …

Wait. If you believe that the public shares these views, and that you could do the job, whynot consider running for President?

I’d do the job as well as or better than anyone else. It’s my hope that George Bush can do a great job.

You categorically don’t want to be President?

I don’t want to be President. I’m one hundred percent sure. I’d change my mind only if I saw this country continue to go down the tubes.

Later in the 1990s, Trump again got the Playboy Interview treatment, written by Mark Bowden, who has resurfaced nearly two decades later to say …

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.

He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.

I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).

It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.

What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.

“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.

“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.

I told him that I would not be interested.

“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”

The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the tim>, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.

“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.

I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

Foerderer came back on the line. She said:

“He’s too livid to speak.”

Be that as it may, Trump’s supporters should be more concerned about what RedState reports:

In July, Donald Trump made a statementabout the 2008 financial crisis that left many conservatives perplexed:

“I identify with some things as a Democrat…I was never a Bush fan. [When] the economy crashed so horribly under George Bush, because of mistakes they made having to do with banking and lots of other things, I don’t think the Democrats would have done that.”

Now to be sure, there is plenty of blame to be spread around. Both parties in Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and even the American public all contributed to the crisis.

But if Trump thinks that the Democrats were not to blame, well, I will refer him to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

Trump’s statement prompted me to research what he thought about the economy-and proposals to fix it-during the end of Bush’s term and the beginning of Obama’s term (of which he had high hopes):

We have a young, vibrant, smart president who, I think, is going to do a really good job.

And, honestly, he has to do a really good job or this country maybe will never be the same. We had eight years of a horrendous president, a terrible president. You cannot get worse than Bush. And I really believe that Obama will be a great president, and I hope he is.

Anyway, I found out that Donald Trump supported the bank bailouts.

“Now, I did not know about a $700 billion bailout, in all fairness. And I think probably, it is something — it’s sad, but, probably, it’s something that has to get done, because your financial system is most likely going to come to a halt if it does not. So, it is a pretty sad day for this country.”

And the auto bailouts:

“I think the government should stand behind them 100 percent. You cannot lose the auto companies. They’re great. They make wonderful products.”

He really liked the stimulus package:

“I thought he did a terrific job,” Trump told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “This is a strong guy knows what he wants, and this is what we need.”

“First of all, I thought he did a great job tonight,” said Trump. “I thought he was strong and smart, and it looks like we have somebody that knows what he is doing finally in office, and he did inherit a tremendous problem. He really stepped into a mess, Greta.”

Van Susteren then asked Trump if a simple payroll tax holiday might be a better way to stimulate the flagging economy. Trump, however, held firm in his support for Obama’s plan, which he praised for the wide breadth of approaches it took to combatting the crisis.

“Well, I think taxes are very good. I think it goes quickly. It is easily done, and etc., etc.,” Trump told Van Susteren, “but building infrastructure, building great projects, putting people to work in that sense is also very good, so I think you have a combination of both plus he is doing a rebate system and I think that is good also.”

Despite concerns with the cost, he liked Obama’s healthcare plan:

VAN SUSTEREN: What is your thought about the health care reform that is being at least proposed, at this point?

TRUMP: Well, I think it’s noble, except I just don’t know how a country that’s in such debt — we are really a debtor nation right now, and I just don’t know how a country in this kind of trouble can afford it. It’s very — I love the idea, but can this country afford it? Will it destroy the country? Will it destroy other people that have been paying into health care for years? I mean, will that destroy other people? It’s a very, very tough situation. I love it from many standpoints, but can this country afford it? And maybe this isn’t the right time.

(By the way, Trump IS and HAS been a fan of Obama’s ideal healthcare system: single payer)

How about Obama’s longstanding obsession with progressive taxation? Trump agrees:

“The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” he said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind. Because as you make a certain amount of money, I think you should have to graduate upward.”

How about “protecting ” Social Security and Medicare from financially responsible and necessary reform? Trump won’t touch them either:

“Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut.”

Throw in his misunderstanding of the economic effects of immigration and free trade, and the current GOP front-runner is one confused man when it comes to the economy.

Of course Trump understands the real estate and entertainment businesses. But his skill in those areas clearly has not translated to a broader understanding of free market principles.

If Republican voters care about those principles, more than say, bluster, it will only be a matter of time before Trump fades. Otherwise, and it is a very real possibility, the GOP just may nominate another candidate who represents more of the same economic failures of the past.