Trumphalism

I’ve been trying to conduct an assessment of President Trump’s personality without using qualifiers – adjectives, adverbs – emotive verbs and nouns, or psychological terminology.  It’s not easy, but here I go with my considered opinion:

He is self-focussed, and possesses a set of values that recognise very little outside his image of himself.  Anything that transcends or contradicts these values is not only opposed, rejected or even denied –   its existence does not often cross the boundaries of his perception.

When that does happen, he reacts with violence, verbal or sometimes physical. The latter is not a practical option for him personally because he’s not strong or brave enough (he outsources it) so language is his only means of attack.  As far as I can observe, though, he rarely engages in direct person-to-person verbal confrontation, preferring to use technology as a masking intermediary.  This is because he does not recognise the concept of dialogue, preferring one-way rhetoric.

Given that rhetoric is thus his only means of self-promotion, his use of language is elementary.  Most of his communications break two of the rules I set myself at the outset – they consist mostly of emotive verbs and nouns and qualifiers thereof – and his terminological vocabulary is small, certainly not extending into specialist or scientific fields.

Finally, although – allowing for his frequent swerves off and then back onto his chosen road – he is mostly consistent in the notions he promotes, his utterances suggest that the notions themselves are not his own but are drawn from a pool of political philosophy dating back centuries.  Those surrounding and motivating him appear to have these notions clearly in focus, and use a broad repertoire of political skills to promote them through his utterances.  It does look, though, as if even they are struggling to keep up with their own creation.

There, I trust that’s all sufficiently objective?  Good, now I can put it a different way:

I believe President Trump to be a self-worshipping, paranoid, unreasoning, inarticulate, manipulative, destructive, cowardly bully. Popular hysteria inexplicably inserted him where he is and evil forces are propping him up there. If it weren’t for that, frankly, he’d just be boring.