I pay close attention to the syntax and vocabulary of Trump’s tweets. People have been writing about his bizarre use of quotation marks, making the plausible suggestion that he uses them so as to hedge his prose, about which he feels insecure. This sounds right to me: he is clearly uncomfortable with the written word, as his speech indicates. He is semi-literate and he knows it. This may account for his popularity as well as his shaky ego. His relationship to language is distant and tenuous, like his relationship to people.

People say Trump is a narcissist. I don’t think so: I think Trump hates himself and with good reason. What he loves is his image–that garish, vulgar, money-saturated image. This is why he hates to be criticized and disrespected: it hurts his image. Once you grasp that everything he does is meant to promote his image it begins to make more sense. There is really nothing to him apart from his image.