@farmerman,
Yes. And how typical for him.
I've been thinking about Arendt's "banality of evil", that it comes much closer to this Trump phenomenon than Orwell's 1984 where the antagonists had a sort of dignity in their totalitarian ideology that is completely absent with Trump and many of his supporters. 1984's main antagonist, O'Brien, believed in the totalitarian arrangement of the social order he was helping to maintain. He was neither stupid nor uneducated and Orwell made no suggestion that O'Brien was motivated for selfish reasons.
Trump, on the other hand, demonstrates no discernible ideological stance whatsoever. He is entirely concerned with how his power can benefit himself and
that is the only consistent feature in the man's behavior. He is cheap and he is tawdry and
far more likely to be pushing shitty vacuum cleaners door to door than reading John Rawls or Thomas Jefferson. Trump is as banal as it gets.