More: The 80-year-old president issued dark warnings at this week's GOP midterm convention about the nation's future if Republicans lost the November elections, and he even asked his followers to pledge to cheat if necessary or risk hellfire, and politics and history professor Alan Elrod published a column for Liberal Currents offered a disturbing theory about his plans.

"Trump's speech came off more like a sermon from Jonestown, and observers noticed," Elrod wrote. "My own overriding thought was: 'This speech was like some sort of performance art piece of a live entombing of a mad king and his most loyal followers.'"

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"My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has an elegantly simple theory for why Trump has become even more obsessed with legacy and with slapping his name on buildings and projects than he already was over his lifelong career as a shameless self-promoter: fear of death," Elrod wrote.

"As she put it: 'My current theory of Donald Trump is that he is utterly gripped by the terror of death, and is desperately attempting to leave some mark on the world that history cannot erase " this is the point of the wars, the annexation threats, the D.C. vandalism. I think right now he is genuinely fixated on adding new American territory as the brass ring, the thing they'll never be able to take away from his memory.'"

Elrod found himself inclined to agree as he watched the president's rambling, self-aggrandizing speech.

"It's a macabre but convincing psychological assessment," he wrote. "Rather than making America great again, Trump is inflicting grievous harm on it with tariffs, now upgraded to import bans against select Canadian goods; an illegal war; and a total ransacking of our public and private sectors for the enrichment of his courtiers and his family. And he is going to bury us all with him in a tomb of his own design " a ballroom."