Trump Secretly Despises His Own Supporters

Jonathan Chait: “Deep in a Politico report about President Trump’s attempt to build support for firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump loathes for recusing himself from the investigation of a campaign he was part of, is a striking artifact of Trumpism. The president’s swelling complaints against Sessions include the fact that he ‘doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers’ and that Trump ‘can’t stand his Southern accent.'”

“Conservatives have spent decades depicting liberals as coastal snobs…. Given the attention they have lavished on such picayune details as John Kerry’s failure to properly order cheesesteak properly, it’s not even possible to imagine what they would do with direct evidence of a president disdaining his attorney general’s University of Alabama law degree and regional accent. Imagine one of those scenes from a ’90s action movie where the bad guys are wearing night-vision goggles in the dark, and then suddenly faced with blinding light.”

“But as is so often the case, the accusation that was made falsely against Democrats turns out to be true of Trump. For all his vaunted populism, he is filled with contempt for average people in general and his own supporters in particular.”