On extravagance - John McWhorter in NYT:

‘I see it differently. Trump is just bored.
The evidence lies in what linguists have termed extravagance. As Martin Haspelmath has explained it, extravagance is the linguistic effort not simply to be understood but to be noticed. Haspelmath says this effort drives much of human communication and the way language changes over time. He notes that “speakers not only want to be clear or ‘expressive,’ sometimes they also want their utterance to be imaginative and vivid — they want to be little ‘extravagant poets’ in order to be noticed, at least occasionally.”’

(…)

‘I’ve even noticed a similar escalation in the way I sometimes communicate. I have often told a story about being 5 years old and hearing a friend speak Hebrew with her parents — the first time I had encountered a language I couldn’t understand — and about how I found the experience so frustrating that I cried. My telling of the tale has, shall we say, grown over the decades, honed by audience response and my own quest for novelty. My latest version has me frantically asking my mother why we didn’t speak Hebrew, and her responding with tart affection “Because we aren’t Jewish! Get in the car, Jughead!” Recently I decided to get to the palimpsest. My mother was indeed in the habit of calling me Jughead, after the Archie comics character who ate a lot, as I did (plus I had kind of a big head). However, if I squint and think about it, what really happened is that my mother waited until we were in the car, then soberly explained that Hebrew was a language Jewish people spoke. And I did not cry — I just felt left out, angry and confused. The version I have come to tell is just a better story, because I’ve seasoned it with extravagance.’

(…)

‘My fear is that Trump in office would be perfectly and horrifically sane and more or less stay that way for his whole term. What many see of late as crazy is just him champing at the bit to get into office so that he can use it for his mentally maleficent ends.’

Read the article here.

Most of us are un the habit of seasoning up our life stories with a bit of extravagance.
Often the extravagance is so mild that it is almost mundane.
And yes, we try to have security and at the same we are aiming for some excitement.
We read books, go to the movies, have an affair, try to run a marathon, in our quest for a bit of extravagance Perhaps, Trump was just looking for some extravagance in his life, for some pizazz.

After all, Saddam sent his army to Kuwait because he was afraid that his soldiers were getting bored.