Likewise, it takes willful blindness to Trump’s own history of explicit racism to treat his crusade against diversity and integration as an embrace of meritocracy (please ignore the people he has chosen to lead the government) rather than a function of the same bigotries that drove him to attack Barack Obama as illegitimate and unfit to be president.

There is no evidence that Trump is a figure of deep thought or serious insight. There is no evidence that Trump is anything other than what he’s been for his entire time in the public eye: an ego-driven creature of boundless envy and vicious, overlapping resentments. Those resentments have led him on a grand tour of retribution against the public.