For months, the political press has been grappling with the greased-pig problem that is Donald Trump, trying to pin down the Republican front-runner as he defies establishment expectations and rejects basic standards of decorum. Much of the time I devoted to my Trump biography was consumed with the same activity: I spent countless hours fact-checking the torrent of slippery claims he made during our interviews. Even more difficult was divining the source of his sense of entitlement.

As campaign reporters are now coming to realize, Trump is not concerned with anyone's dignity, even his own, and will readily deploy lies and distortions when they serve as applause lines. None of the Trump claims checked by Politifact has turned out to be absolutely true by its standards, while 30 have been judged false or, worse, “pants on fire” statements. Yet Trump refuses to correct himself and, instead, ups the ante. Recently he tweeted race-baiting false statistics that appeared to have originated from a neo-Nazi source.

Some who try to understand why Trump would do such things might wonder whether he's a deeply wounded, insecure soul compensating with narcissistic bluster. This diagnosis doesn't fit the Trump who answered my questions for many hours, nor does it match the conclusion reached by his second wife, Marla Maples. “He's a king,” said Maples when I interviewed her. “I mean truly. He is. He's a king. He really is a ruler of the world, as he sees it.”

Michael D'Antonio is the author of "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success."

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie criticized President Obama’s fight against climate change and advocated more military action against Islamic State in a lengthy interview with the Atlantic.

Christie said he would take stronger action against Islamic State than Obama has, though he didn't specify what that would entail. He accused Obama of ignoring the plight of Syrians in the country's 5-year-old civil war in favor of focusing on the fight against global warming.

“The president thinks that climate change is what we should be leading the world on,” Christie said. “My view is that the 230,000 dead Syrians ain’t worried about climate change. Forget about whether we could have saved them or not, they’re not worried about climate change, man.”

Christie disagreed with Obama’s decision not to spearhead an effort to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“The president said if [Assad] starts using chemical weapons against his people, that’s a red line that he shouldn’t have crossed, and then the Americans will take action,” he said, adding that he thinks Obama didn’t follow through with his word and fell back on negotiations, not action.

The interviewer, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, also suggested that harsh comments Christie has made on resettling Syrian refugees in the U.S. could threaten his chances of gaining the votes of American Muslims. Christie has said that the U.S. should not accept the refugees, not even "orphans under age 5."

“These folks are Americans and they’re going to say that they’re at as much risk as anyone else. They’re going to want to help,” the governor said.

Raw images of GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz coaching his family provided prime comedy material for "The Daily Show" on Thursday night. Host Trevor Noah criticized the Texas senator's policies and topped off the bit with a sitcom-style intro video of “Senator Dad,” a fictional show about Cruz and his family.

Watch the awkward, unedited footage and get some comic relief courtesy of the "Daily Show" segment "Cruz Your Own Adventure."

On the presidential campaign trail, in the White House and on Twitter, it was as if politicians were responding to completely different events.

Following the shooting rampage in San Bernardino, Democrats forcefully demanded a tightening of the country’s gun laws, laying blame on a culture that allows even people who are not permitted to board airplanes to buy guns with ease. Republicans talked of an entirely separate policy failure, drawing on news reports that the massacre may have been spurred by religious extremists to warn that the country is under attack and ill-equipped to deal with it.

The starkly disparate takeaways from the rampage showed the distance between the two parties on an issue that has become increasingly vital to Americans – their personal safety in the face of mass violence and terrorism. The rampage put presidential candidates in a quandary on a day when almost all of them were holding public events and found themselves under pressure to address the violence in California, even as the facts remained murky.

As more details about the attackers were made public through the day, GOP candidates – nearly all of whom spoke at a Washington forum hosted by the hawkish Republican Jewish Coalition – issued increasingly harsher attacks on what they said was the Obama administration’s unwillingness to come to terms with the true threat posed by Muslim extremists.

The “horrific murder underscores that we are at a time of war, whether or not the current administration realizes it,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said, acknowledging that the motives in the attack were not yet fully clear.