This year has shown us Trump wanted power — but he didn’t want to govern

The 45th president’s philosophy has become clearer over the past few months

Congress will override Donald Trump’s veto of the annual defence bill, a first for this administration. (Getty)

In The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's elegiac novel about the downfall of the Sicilian ancien regime in 1860, the ageing Prince Don Fabrizio ruminates on the nature of power.

On a carriage ride into Palermo he sees the ominous fires of Garibaldi's revolutionaries up in the mountains as they prepare to spring into action; and gazes down at the wealthy churches, abbeys and monasteries in the city below that will be among their targets.

The prince wonders whether both sides have more in common than either would like to admit, whether each is "as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power".