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Trump’s Contempt

Stephen P. Watkins
4 min readApr 25, 2019

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copyright Monthly Review, May 2017

“Contempt” is the word which I think most frequently describes Donald Trump. Contempt for the office of the President because he does his job very badly; contempt for the people of the United States because he treats virtually all of them very badly; contempt for people outside of the United States — especially those of brown or black or yellow skin — because he views them very badly; and contempt for that which is good, or noble, or kind. He has no tolerance of or appreciation for any of these things.

Trump has repeatedly touted himself by proclaiming — certainly with no objective confirmation of its truth— that he’s “the smartest, the fittest, the most capable businessman around,” and that he “has the best words,” and “really knows how to communicate.” This, coming from someone who has probably read fewer than five books in his entire life; who was an undisciplined and ill-educated truant child who repeatedly galivanted Manhattan without permission, so he had to be shipped off to a military school when he was 13; and who literally believes that his Tweets are “the best way to communicate.”

Contempt, as I see it, is a way of putting on an air of superiority in order to mask deep-seated feelings of inferiority. I’m no psychologist, but I’ve lived long enough and experienced enough to feel comfortable in describing Trump’s childhood and early adulthood.

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Stephen P. Watkins
Stephen P. Watkins

Written by Stephen P. Watkins

Top Writer in Politics. Author of “The ‘Plenty’ Book — the Answer to the Question: What Can I do to Make This a Better World?,” available on Amazon.com

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