Trump has an axe to grind and he is out to show how real men get things done.
I hate to admit that, on a much, much, much lower level, I have been in in a similar situation.
Many Americans are waiting for Trump to bomb and he is out to prove that he can get things done.
I once worked for a supervisor that hated me because I was brought into a company as a golden boy who could accomplish things.
My supervisor thought I was a fraud and proceeded to make things difficult for me.
First, he held me to standards that no one else at this job were held to. We (by "we," I mean "I") were required to relay specific information to all of our customers while making sales. A script was to be followed and certain data was to be acquired within a five minute timeframe.
As I listened to other agents, I found that they gleefully blew off the standards in order to meet call time stats.
Because I play by the rules, I found that my call times were higher than most and did not fall into the five minute requirement.
When I was told that I would be fired if I didn't get my times, I put together a plan and figured out how to both relay required information and keep my times down.
I succeeded where no other agent in the company had and this REALLY pissed off my supervisor.
Next, he gave me an assignment to take care of something like ten thousand write-offs within a four week period. At first, I was going to be allowed to stay off of the phones for six hours a day in order to get this done.
I was told that this project was EXTREMELY important and that I could lose my job if it was not completed in the required time.
When my supervisor saw that I was going to get the task done well ahead of time, he cut my off-phone hours to four hours.
Even with four hours off of the phones, it was obvious that I would finish ahead of schedule, so he cut my off phone time down to two hours.
With two hours a day on this project per day, it was going to be close. Mr. Supervisor saw that I might still succeed and then said that I would be allowed to work on the project "in between calls."
Working in between calls made this project impossible. I was also told that I could not work on this project after hours.
So...
I started coming in three hours early and working the project on my own time. I sat in the darkened building from four to seven in the morning off the clock.
My supervisor was a guy that always barely showed up on time, so he never noticed that I was always early on the job. The only thing that he noticed was that I was not working the project in between calls. He assumed that I had given up.
On D-Day, he called me and asked, "Emsley, how are you doing on those write-offs?"
"Oh, hell!" I said. "I forgot! Give me a minute, I'll be right there."
I could hear his smirk over the phone. I showed up at his desk with a giant box of paperwork and said, "Hang on, I've got four more boxes."
I piled the boxes on his desk and told him that I'd finished the job two days ahead of schedule and that I "forgot" to tell him about it.
He quit two weeks later and I got his job.
Something tells me that Trump is about to pull the same stunt...