Trump’s Twitter attack: cause or effect?

It was Aristotle who first ruminated over which came first, the chicken or the egg. “There could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds,” he declared, “or there would have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.”
Leaving aside how little Donald J. Trump resembles the “philosopher-kings” envisioned by Aristotle’s protégé Plato in “The Republic,” a similar question vexes us t