Ten Times Better Man

How great I am, and what a great job I’ve done, and what a phenomenal job I’ve done. — Donald J. Trump, April 1, 2026 I was born and have ever remaind (sic) in the most humble walks of life. — Abraham Lincoln

Tooting one’s own horn used to be seen as a vice.

Anyone who boasted about their accomplishments, possessions or self-styled superiority was viewed, at the very least, as annoying and probably untrustworthy.

We have the idioms and expressions to prove it. So-and-so is all sizzle and no steak. All hat and no cattle. A show-off. A bigmouth. Brash and full of braggadocio. In the Shakespearean comedy All’s Well That Ends Well, the boastful character Parolles, having been exposed as a coward and a liar, arrives at a bitter epiphany: Who knows himself a braggart Let him fear this; for it will come to pass That every braggart shall be found an ass.

I remember a kid in grade school who made the mistake of indignantly protesting that “I’m 10 times better” when another boy was chosen ahead of him as sides were being chosen for a shinny game.

Sixty years later, he is still being referred to by former classmates as “Ten Times Better Man.” Earning a reputation as a show-off,  a poseur, a gasconader, is a blot on one’s character — or it used to be, anyway — all but impossible to shed.

Heck, we all remember a time — not especially long ago — when saying something as simple as “this is excellent” about someone else’s work, let alone your own, could trigger a faint internal recoil, a sense that one ought to qualify, soften, or partially retract the compliment before it caused undue inflation.

Hence the reflexive hedge: nicely done — hope I’m not being overly flattering.

The phrase performs a kind of social double action, delivering approval while simultaneously containing it, as if both speaker and recipient were tacitly collaborating to keep admiration within safe atmospheric limits.

One imagines Victorian engineers in waistcoats crouched beside conversational boilers, adjusting brass dials labelled “Esteem” and “Ego” while a kettle of compliments whistles ominously in the background.

This older etiquette system extended outward into broader cultural expectations, including the way public figures handled their own accomplishments. To praise oneself too directly, too insistently, was to risk appearing not just vain but unserious — the rhetorical equivalent of applauding your own entrance into a room and then awarding yourself a small commemorative plaque for having done so. Possibly from FIFA.

Even if you were a very unstable genius with a robust ego like Isaac Newton, you went about your business with at least a bow toward modesty. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” Newton wrote in that famous letter to jealous antagonist Robert Hooke.

The only part of Albert Einstein’s head that was swollen was that wild torrent of hair: “What I see in Nature is a grand design that we can understand only imperfectly, one which a responsible person must look at with humility.”

To this day, the non-profit Jackie Robinson Foundation — which gives scholarships to minority youths for higher education — honours the spirit of the man who broke the colour bar in Major League Baseball by stressing the worth of being “quick to compliment, slow to blame, and modest in the wake of accomplishment.” Those values used to mean something.

There was an implicit belief that greatness, if real, could withstand a degree of silence — that it did not require constant verbal irrigation lest it wither like a houseplant with performance anxiety.

Of course, history complicates this tidy picture, largely because history is full of men who heard the rule “do not praise yourself” and interpreted it as “praise yourself, but with better lighting.”

Figures like Napoléon Bonaparte curated their own legend with an almost preternatural instinct for optics, ensuring that accounts of victory travelled faster and shone brighter than the inconvenient, mud-coloured realities on the ground. Napoléon did not so much wait for history to judge him as draft its first few chapters personally, possibly while glancing over the editor’s shoulder.

Similarly, Henry VIII engineered a court culture in which admiration functioned less as a spontaneous emotion and more as a basic survival skill, like swimming or not making eye contact with large predators. One imagines a courtier beginning, “Your Majesty, this is very nice — hope I’m not being overly flattering,” and then being gently but firmly removed from the premises, possibly via trebuchet.

Among the Russian autocrats, rulers such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great grasped that if one repeats the word “great” (Velikaya/Velikiy in Russian) often enough in proximity to one’s own name — on coins, in decrees, etched into buildings large enough to be visible from space — it begins to function less as an adjective and more as a permanent surname.

Yet even here, the self-aggrandizement had the decency to be honest about its intentions.

Monarchs and emperors did not pretend to be modest; they did not go on something like a 16th-century equivalent of a fireside chat to explain that they were, deep down, just regular people who happened to be unusually excellent in all measurable respects. Their grandeur was not pitched as relatable.

It was pitched as inevitable, like winter or taxes, only with better costumes.

The shift in more recent times has been subtler and, in its own way, more surreal. As mass media expanded, boasting migrated from throne rooms into arenas of entertainment, where it acquired a kind of theatrical licence.

During the Golden Age of professional wrestling in the 1940s-50s, the flamboyant showman and cowardly cheater Gorgeous George turned bragging into spectacle, strutting and preening in elegant, sequinned robes with such operatic excess that the audience understood the implicit contract: this is a performance, and your role is to either cheer or pay to watch someone remove his dignity with a folding chair.

In the 1960s, Muhammad Ali (who picked up a thing or two about gaudy promotion from “the Human Orchid,” as Gorgeous George had styled himself) elevated self-praise into art, delivering declarations of greatness with such wit and rhythm that they felt less like demands for belief than like beautifully crafted hypotheses awaiting experimental verification in the ring. My favourite poem by the boxer who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee: How it feels to be as great as me: Me? Whee!

Crucially, in Ali’s case, the bragging was seasoning — potent, memorable, but clearly not meant to replace the meal itself. No one left a boxing match thinking, “I, too, should begin every work email by announcing that I am the greatest accounts receivable coordinator of all time.”

What appears to have changed in the current cultural moment is that the seasoning has quietly taken over the plate. The performative frame has thinned to the point of near-invisibility, and the distinction between character and person has blurred into something like a permanent state of self-narration.

When Donald J. Trump — the president whose name we dare not speak, except of course constantly, because not speaking it would be terrible branding — deploys his monotonous array of self-aggrandizing superlatives with the frequency and confidence of a man scattering birdseed into a hurricane, a significant portion of the audience does not interpret this as theatrical excess.

It is received, with a kind of awe-inverted seriousness, as evidence. Received as if he were a foul-mouthed Jesus, with whom he seems to be confused by the third of Americans who remain solidly behind their overlord and personal saviour.

Blessed are the self-congratulatory, for they shall never want for praise, having mastered the art of providing it themselves.

The logic is circular but has the advantage of never needing to stop: only someone truly powerful would speak in such absolute terms; therefore, speaking in such terms demonstrates power; therefore, the more absolute the terms, the more powerful the speaker must be.

It is a self-licking ice cream cone (only in his case, something more pornographic) of rhetoric, continuously validating itself while somehow becoming larger, louder and more lactose-intolerant over time.

Within this system, older virtues like humility or generosity in crediting others begin to look not just quaint but actively counterproductive, like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight or a footnote to a shouting match. Why share credit when monopolizing it creates a cleaner narrative? Why admit uncertainty when certainty, however unmoored from reality, performs so much better in the marketplace of attention?

And attention, of course, is the invisible hand here, busily rewarding volume, repetition and emotional intensity while quietly ignoring nuance, hesitation or the phrase hope I’m not being overly flattering, which now reads less like politeness and more like a transmission from a distant, possibly extinct civilization.

The quiet, self-effacing individual risks vanishing entirely, like a polite person trying to merge into freeway traffic while using turn signals and making eye contact. The brash self-promoter, by contrast, achieves visibility simply by refusing to acknowledge the existence of other lanes.

You see this in professional sports. You see it in the arts. You see it in academia. Most egregiously, you see it everywhere else— from politics to the playground. Ten Times Better Man exults.

Which makes that earlier, hedged compliment feel almost radical in its restraint. It implies a shared agreement that not everything needs to be maximized, that praise can exist without immediately inflating into a parade float the size of a small nation. It suggests that value might still be something discovered, even conferred, rather than relentlessly asserted at decibel levels normally associated with aircraft.

None of this is to deny that confidence has its uses or to assert that history’s quieter figures were always more virtuous.

Napoléon did not reshape Europe by whispering affirmations into a diary. Ali did not become an icon by modestly suggesting he was “among the better heavyweights of his era, statistically speaking.”

But there remains a difference — subtle, endangered, and possibly hiding under a table somewhere — between using bravado as a tool and mistaking it for the entire toolbox.

The older model preserved a gap between achievement and proclamation, a pause in which reality could test rhetoric and occasionally file a complaint. In that pause, humility and generosity had room to function not as weaknesses but as stabilizing forces, like ballast in a ship that might otherwise tip over from the sheer weight of its own adjectives.

Remove that pause, and we arrive at something like our current condition: a world in which the Orange Julius Squeezer stands there soaking in fart-ridden amour propre as his entire administration of soulless sycophants, bootlickers, toadies and suck-ups exists solely to eulogize him and blasphemous pastors have the effrontery to portray him before adoring chumps and patsies as an avenging Jesus Christ, war criminal.

We’re now in a world where every claim to greatness arrives pre-certified, every superlative is self-issued, and even the simplest praise must be inflated to absurdity just to register at all — “very nice” metastasizing into “the greatest compliment ever received, possibly in the history of compliments, many people are saying this, very smart people” — at which point the poor Victorian engineers, their gauges shattered and their boilers screaming, can only salute politely before being launched into orbit by the pressure of it all.

“Nations do not die from invasion,” Honest Abe once observed, “they die from internal rottenness. … What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.”