The crowd roared

Greg Sargent at The Post underlines the obvious: Trump is an abusive monstrosity bent on destruction.

At a rally in Ohio on Thursday night, President Trump drew deafening cheers by boasting about his order to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, deriding Democrats with petty schoolyard taunts and mocking the very idea that Congress should act to constrain his warmaking powers.

At his rally, Trump belittled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “not operating with a full deck.” He derided House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff as “you little pencil neck.” The crowd roared, demonstrating how heavily Trump’s petty abusiveness figures as a factor in his appeal.

But what Trump really displayed here is that his deranged attacks on the opposition aren’t mere insults. Taken along with Trump’s mockery of congressional demands for input into decisions of war, they demonstrate a profound contempt for the very notion that his most consequential decisions should be subject to oversight and accountability at all.

Did we need any more demonstration of that? He’s made it very clear all along.

Mockery of the opposition is, of course, a constant in politics. But this is different. Trump regularly crosses over into a form of harsh belittling and abuse that is designed to delegitimize the opposition, that is, to tell his voters that the opposition has no legitimate institutional role in our politics at all.

Well…I think that attributes too much thought and deliberation to the abuser. Sure, the abuse delegitimizes, but he would do it even if it didn’t. He does it because that’s who he is, and because he thinks it’s funny, and because he thinks he’s a brilliant and successful insult comic, like Don Rickles but sexy and gorgeous. He does it because he likes doing it. That’s who and what he is: a person who loves insulting people, who can’t get enough of insulting people, who lives to insult people. He’s that guy. He’s a howling wilderness of ego and contempt, and the insults are an inevitable output of that recipe.

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