“I started off in a small office with my father in Brooklyn and Queens,” Trump said in his 2015 campaign kickoff speech. “And my father said … ‘Donald, don’t go into Manhattan. That’s the big leagues. We don’t know anything about that. Don’t do it.’ I said, ‘I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings. I gotta do it, Dad. I’ve gotta do it.’”

In Trump’s version of the story, he eventually achieved his dream by crossing the river, conquering the island, and triumphantly erecting an eponymous skyscraper in the middle of town as a monument to his greatness.

In truth, though, the city’s ruling class never did warm to his arrival, and they greeted every one of his ensuing accomplishments with a collective sneer. To them, it didn’t matter how many buildings he built, or books he sold, or tabloid covers he appeared on—Trump was a vulgar self-promoter, a new-money rube, a walking assault on good taste and manners. He was, in short, not one of them. And he knew it.

Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1967, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” In many ways, Trump still seems like he’s on that journey—convinced that there’s some destination he can reach, some victory he can achieve, that will finally silence the din of elite ridicule and win him entry into their ranks. It is when this fantasy collides most violently with reality that he tends to lash out.

Trump’s political rise is instructive here. When he first began teasing the possibility of a 2016 presidential bid, the chorus of scorn from the political class was deafening. (I would know.) Former aides have told me that his decision to run was motivated largely by a desire to prove his sophisticated skeptics wrong. But even as his campaign took off, the respect he craved never materialized—and the further he got, the hotter his resentment seemed to burn.

Indeed, some of his biggest wins on the campaign trail were followed immediately by angry tantrums and disgruntled outbursts.

After formally accepting his party’s presidential nomination last July, for example, he embarked on a bizarre grievance-airing campaign swing, during which he complained incessantly about the unfair attacks being leveled at him from the Democratic convention stage. At one stop, Trump told his crowd, “I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard their heads would spin.” At another, he grumbled that Hillary Clinton had not adequately congratulated him for “having done something that nobody has ever done in the history of politics in this nation.” Despite pleas and protests from his advisers, he pursued an impossible-to-win feud with Muslim Gold Star parents who had criticized his grasp of the Constitution. The newly minted nominee became so belligerent and erratic that party leaders were reportedly plotting an “intervention.”