The emotional impulses that made Donald Trump plunge into the presidential arena and may determine how he reacts in the event that he loses are laid bare in a just-released series of excerpts from interviews he gave to a biographer two years ago.

The latter scenario - a humiliating defeat on 8 November - might not be pretty, if you take seriously some of what was said to Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent time with Mr Trump and his first wife, Ivana, in 2014, before he began his presidential bid.

Copies of transcripts and tapes of the conversations, mostly conducted in Mr Trump’s office and apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan, were handed to The New York Times by Mr Antonio. He also gave them earlier to the Clinton campaign, though it is not clear how they used them.

“Pretty old and pretty boring stuff. Hope people enjoy it,” was the official response of Mr Trump to a request for comment from The New York Times ahead of publication.

What most haunts Mr Trump, it would appear, is not just failure, which he essentially rules out as an option in his life, but failure and loss of face under the public gaze. (And of course there are few feats more exposed to public scrutiny than winning - or losing - a presidential contest.)

“I never had a failure,” Mr. Trump said in one of the interviews, “because I always turned a failure into a success,” glossing over the serial bankruptcies of his businesses in the 1990s.

In an especially telling passage, Ivana recalls the first time she went skiing with Mr Trump, who expected to outshine her. He had no clue that she was in fact accomplished on the slopes.

“So he goes and stops, and he says, ‘Come on, baby. Come on, baby,’” she recalled. “I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. ... He could not take it. He could not take it.” Only later did they retrieve his abandoned gear from the piste.

Mr Trump is meanwhile heard to brutally dismiss other men who, in his mind, have either slipped from their once high perches or embarrassed themselves publicly. One was Arsenio Hall, once a successful nighttime TV host who had virtually vanished from view until Mr Trump brought him on set for his Celebrity Apprentice series a few years ago.

“Dead as a doornail,” was his assessment of Mr Hall, “dead as dog meat.” He went on, showing disgust over empathy: “Couldn’t get on television. They wouldn’t even take his phone call.”

He summoned similar disdain for a well known Wall Street banker who got drunk at a charity event at the Waldorf Hotel and had to be carried out with all of Manhattan society and his peers in the financial world looking on. (Mr Trump does not drink.)

“We all had a leg, an arm, a back, and we carried him out of the room that night, right after he made the worst speech you’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I never looked at him the same way after that...I’ll never forget that in front of a room of the most important people, we had to carry him out of the room. And so things like that had an impact on me.”

Mr Trump acknowledged a thirst he has had since adolescence for the attention of the press as well as his own special talent for using it to provide free advertising for his business enterprises - a skill he has more recently applied to his political ambitions. The media that he excoriates on the campaign trail, therefore, has always been his ally. Offered a chance to appear somewhere, he would hardly ever demur.

“I could say, ‘No,’ and then I could advertise a project that I’m doing…and spend a half a million dollars on it or a million dollars, or I can do the show and spend nothing and be on for a lot longer,” he said. “Do you understand what I meant? So I’ve always felt it was a positive thing.”

Once in business, he had a firm make a record of every time his name appeared in the press. “There are thousands of them a day,” he told Mr D’Antonio. “Thousands, thousands a day.”

The mogul also spoke to Mr D’Antonio about the thrill he feels walking into a crowded room and everyone’s gaze immediately falling on him, as if where some kind of magnet. Asked when that first started, he replied, “Long time ago. It’s always been that way.”

Mr Trump reportedly resisted getting too reflective about the sum total of his life. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “I don’t like to analyse myself because I might not like what I see.” He denied having any particularly heroes, and almost boasted about his lack of interest in history. “I don’t like talking about the past,” he said. “It’s all about the present and the future.”