Donald Trump as a Salvador Dali doppelganger

“Thirty-Five Years After His Death, Salvador Dali Is Still a Phenomenon,” screamed an Observer headline, conjuring up a current “phenomenon” – Trump - for the same reason: outlandish behavior, beginning with the genius boast.

In a 1958 TV interview, Mike Wallace introduced Dalí as “a self-confessed genius with an ingenious flair for publicity.” In like manner, Trump, also known for a flair for publicity, bragged in a series of tweets that he is “a very stable genius.”

The commonalities between Dali and Trump are uncanny. Keep reading.

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, now showing “Dali, Disruption and Devotion,” uses the word “outlandish,” referring to the painter’s “bizarre imagery.”

But Dali was outlandish in ways that went beyond his photo-real renderings of melting clocks and shattered rhinoceros horns - all purported to be his dream life.

Who dreams in photo-real detail? An inveterate attention-seeker, that’s who. Trump is similarly bent on grabbing headlines with varied outrageousness.

Then there’s Dali’s showmanship featured his long cape, gold walking stick, and upturned waxed mustache, which he habitually displayed on television talk shows.

Anything to call attention to himself and saying things like, "Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí."

In similar fashion, Trump’s showmanship includes dying his hair blond, styling it in a comb-over to hide his balding head, and wearing florid-toned makeup to give his puffy pale face a ruddy complexion.

Wait, there’s another commonality between Dali and Trump that bears a mention: the intention to confuse. As the painter famously said, “What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.” Wasn’t that the ex-president’s modus operandi when he claimed victory in the last election?

All that said, the most egregious commonality between Dali and Trump was their crime against their followers.

According to Merle Secrest’s 1986 bio “Salvador Dali,” the artist signed black sheets of paper and sold them for $10 million to mass-produce “signed prints” of his work.

Dali signed a reported 17,000 blank sheets in 1976 and 1977, giving rise to a $1 billion fake print industry. Counterfeit prints by Dali are so numerous that the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, declines to attribute anything after 1980.

And Sotheby's and Christie’s in London are so skittish about the authenticity of Dalli’s prints that they won’t put any on the auction block except etchings rendered in the ‘30s.

Trump, in turn, cheated his followers, the students at Trump University, by promising to teach them the "secrets of success" in the real estate industry.”

A federal court approved a $25 million settlement for the students who paid Trump a "one-year apprenticeship" of $1,495, and a "membership" over $10,000, and "Gold Elite" classes costing $35,000.

Trump’s illegal ways and means make him a latter-day Dali. Neither man should be recorded in history as a “phenomenon” when the more accurate term is robber baron.