Everybody’s talking about this long piece by Buzzfeed’s conservative politics writer McKay Coppins, talking about how a Trump feature he wrote a while back may have baited Donald into running for president just to show up his critics. Excerpts:

Donald Trump stood on a debate stage in downtown Detroit, surrounded by haters he was determined to dispatch: Liddle Marco to his right, Lyin’ Ted to his left, Megyn Kelly at the moderator’s table straight ahead, and — somewhere out there, in a darkened living room 1,500 miles away — me.

About 30 minutes into the debate, Kelly asked Trump to respond to a recent BuzzFeed News report about his position on immigration.

“First of all, BuzzFeed?” Trump said, waving an index finger in the air. “They were the ones that said under no circumstances will I run for president — and were they wrong.” My phone lit up with a frenzied flurry of tweets, texts, and emails, each one carrying variations of the same message: This is all your fault.

It has to do with a 2013 profile Coppins wrote of Trump, claiming that his presidential candidacy was a sham. It badly got on Trump’s nerves, and he wouldn’t stop tweeting about it and complaining about it. Trump became obsessed, publicly so. More:

As Trump completed his conquest of the Republican Party this year, I contemplated my supposed role in the imminent fall of the republic — retracing my steps; poring over old notes, interviews, and biographies; talking to dozens of people. What had most struck me during my two days with Trump was his sad struggle to extract even an ounce of respect from a political establishment that plainly viewed him as a sideshow. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that he’d felt this way for virtually his entire life — face pressed up against the window, longing for an invitation, burning with resentment, plotting his revenge.

I had landed on a long and esteemed list of haters and losers — spanning decades, stretching from Wharton to Wall Street to the Oval Office — who have ridiculed him, rejected him, dismissed him, mocked him, sneered at him, humiliated him — and, now, propelled him all the way to the Republican presidential nomination, with just one hater left standing between him and the nuclear launch codes.

What have we done?

Read the whole thing. You’ll enjoy it, I predict. The thing about it is how, through piling up telling details, Coppins shows that Trump has only ever been about showing up the people who look down on him. For example, here’s Coppins talking about how the White House Correspondents Dinner turned into a roast of Trump, who was in the audience and didn’t expect to become the butt of so many jokes:

The longer the night went on, the more conspicuous Trump’s glower became. He didn’t offer a self-deprecating chuckle, or wave warmly at the cameras, or smile with the practiced good humor of the aristocrats and A-listers who know they must never allow themselves to appear threatened by a joke at their expense. Instead, Trump just sat there, stone-faced, stunned, simmering — Carrie at the prom covered in pig’s blood.

There’s this moment from last year, just before Trump made his presidential announcement, which was still not a sure thing:

One morning in early June, Nunberg recalled, he was sitting in Trump Tower as his boss read that day’s New York Post. There was a column by conservative writer Jonah Goldberg gleefully ridiculing the Apprentice star’s 2016 prospects. “He’s a more plausible candidate than, say, Honey Boo Boo,” it read, “but that’s mostly because of constitutional age limits.” When Trump finished, he set the paper down quietly on his desk.

“Why don’t they respect me, Sam?” Trump asked.

The pathos of these moments is, frankly, stunning. You see that behind all that bullying and bluster is a radically insecure boy from Queens who can’t buy his way into the elites and who doesn’t understand why. Trump naturally appeals to and channels the resentment of people like him. This explains the political jiu-jitsu he’s been doing for the past year, and that has allowed him to defeat the GOP Establishment: the more they make fun of him, the more powerful he becomes.

The last American president who was so radically insecure and resentful was Richard Nixon, who was undone by his paranoia, and very nearly caused a constitutional crisis. Nixon was an extraordinarily gifted politician who, whatever his many faults, understood statesmanship. Trump is just a guy from TV. And he might just become the most powerful man in the world.

Coppins’s piece is one long brief for why a man who is so messed up on the inside should never, ever be given that kind of power. But you know what? He just might win. Voters this year have the chance to choose between the Nixon Of The Democrats, and Donald Milhous Trump, who has all of Nixon’s vices but none of his virtues.