Imagine what that would mean for a Trump presidency. His agenda wouldn’t be conservative, moderate, liberal or for that matter coherent. It would be self-affirming and self-aggrandizing: whatever it takes to remain the focus of everyone’s gaze, the syllable tumbling from everyone’s lips. Trump, Trump, Trump.

It’s no surprise that some of the instructors at Trump University pressured students into writing rave reviews of the school, as The Times’s Michael Barbaro and Steve Eder recently documented. It existed chiefly to make Trump feel good about himself.

Of course some of the groupies at Trump’s rallies turn physically aggressive, a phenomenon that drew closer scrutiny and more alarm last week. The man they worship is an agent of agitation with little restraint or decorum of his own.

Commentators keep marveling at the way he “dominates” or “owns” almost every news cycle, as if what he says and does are all plotted in advance and part of some sophisticated, disciplined political strategy.

But is he executing a plan or surrendering to a jones? Brilliant or just fruitfully pathological? He mints fresh insults to monopolize the spotlight, but that’s most likely a spontaneous reaction to how cold and lonely he becomes whenever it starts to recede. Maybe he’s a multimedia mastermind, maybe just a publicity glutton. There’s a difference.

Note the oddity and questionable utility of the frequency with which he still makes those telephone calls to cable news shows and sits down with interrogators. Most politicians with a lead like his would be protecting it somewhat, playing things a bit safer, running out the clock — as he seemed to be doing, belatedly and for the first time, during the debate on Thursday night. A normal front-runner under normal circumstances minimizes his or her exposure, lest a moment be fumbled and a mistake made.

Not Trump. He has been an interview machine, an interview mill. He can’t help himself. Last week he had two chats with the crew at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and a long sit-down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He did Fox News at least five times. He did NBC’s “Today,” ABC’s “Good Morning America” and CBS’s “Face the Nation.”