I wish I was as much a prognosticator as I occasionally appear to be but outside of a small spectrum knack for pattern recognition, it comes down to “I have known fucked up narcissists (or whatever), and they generally tend to respond to X with Y.”
To roughly quote Harlan Ellison responding to questions about why a character did a thing in his ST: TOS script:
“The same reason anyone does anything — because it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
