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Commentary: It’s Trump’s world. We just live in it.

The president is planning to meet us in the middle of 5th Avenue.

In this Feb. 12, 2018, photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with state and local officials about infrastructure in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

“Sometimes, in spite of its stolid, boring commitment to lying, a despotic regime will actually tell you all you need to know.”

— Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair

Christopher Hitchens knew Donald Trump well enough to describe him as a “nutball narcissistic tycoon.”

Who knows how Hitchens, who died in 2011, would describe Trump today? Even with as little as he knew of the man, he certainly would have anticipated Trump’s profligate “commitment to lying” that is the modus operandi of his tweets, speeches, epithets and off-the-cuff comments, any of which “tell you all you need to know” about methods and motives of the man who is our president.

Because all despots are more interested in preserving their own world than in making ours better.

The sources and methods of any despot are similar to those of any other, as is a despot’s appetite to preserve power, whatever the cost. Thus, to stay in power, Bashar al-Assad has been responsible for the slaughter of more than half a million of his own people, and Kim Jong-un has starved the North Korean people to finance his nuclear ambition.

And thus Donald Trump.

Trump’s methodology isn’t as extreme as Assad’s or Kim’s, but his motive for what he has done is the same: preservation of power for purposes entirely personal. Trump’s gargantuan ego and concomitant insecurity are on display in everything he does, including his State of the Union address, in which his self-applause, preening and blatant self-congratulation were on view to a national audience for what seemed as long as Fidel Castro’s speeches used to be. And to the same end: to broadcast the message, “I am so good. They are so bad.”

One expects a State of the Union message to be selective, slanted and self-focused on a president’s accomplishments. And many commentators were impressed by how sane and even-tempered much of the speech seemed when compared to Trump’s tweets and rallies. But that it was not outrageous is a misdirection, a cheap card trick designed to get us to gloss the more insidious insensitivities crafted into the address by Dracula look-alike and Trump political adviser Steven Miller, such as this clunker: that the American nuclear family is protected by ending “chain migration.”

This is perfect proof of the Hitchens Axiom that despotic regimes inadvertently reveal themselves. All the statement needs is translation from Beltway Babble to English. “Chain migration” is an anti-immigration euphemism for “family reunification.” Do Mexican families not cleave to one another in a “nuclear” bond of acculturation and love? Hispanic families tend to be so tightly knit as to make “American” families look anarchic. What Trump/Miller actually are saying is that those aren’t families. Those are immigrant infestations, the danger of which is magnified by litters of DACA children.

Before he was elected, Trump boasted: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Applying the Hitchens Axiom, we better understand what Trump intends: That he not be held accountable. Not for what he thinks. Not for what he says. Not for what he does. In short, that he has the absolute power to which he and all despots pretend.

And for those of us who choose to believe words have meaning and actions consequences?

In the spirit of cooperation claimed by the State of the Union, Trump is planning to meet with us — in the middle of 5th Avenue.

Robert A. Rees teaches Mormon Studies at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.

Robert Rees is visiting professor and director of Mormon studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Calif. Clifton Jolley is president of Advent Communications, Ogden.