And he also said, at his recent news conference: “I am the least racist person you have ever seen”

And I am sure that Trump believes this. What does it mean to be just the least bit racist or the least bit anti-Semitic? And not only that, but the least bit racist that anyone has ever seen? While that is the level of grandiosity we have come to expect, aside from not being believable, isn’t the statement an unconscious contradiction, like a Freudian slip?

If saying that you are the least bit racist, aren’t you saying “yes, I do harbor a bit of racism, but it is very tiny so it doesn’t count.” Couldn’t that have been closer to the truth and that is the one that fits with the words Trump spoke.

We always thought that one was either a racist or not. And if you are a bit racist, that behavior might hopefully be modulated by one’s culture, prevalent laws, immediate environment, social nexus, etc. It might be a racism that doesn’t threaten anyone because it resides in a culture that is otherwise magnanimous.

That is until the culture, laws, social nexus shifts under, for example, a Trumpean totalitarian regime (enabled partly by the scapegoating of gays, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims),

Indeed, racism can grow like cancer in a culture that feeds it. It would be like a cancer cell in the body (if now just starting in the brain of Trump), a bitty piece of tumor. A molehill bit of racism that can turn into a mountain.

Moreover, aren’t the words in a class of self delusion all by themselves. Trump could have just as easily been saying:  “I am the least dishonest person you have ever seen”. Uh Oh!

For clarity, one can put it another way too: “Everyone is dishonest really, but I am only a little bit dishonest””

Grandiosity aside, you are either honest, always striving to be honest,  and if not, honesty is just a word. It is not a matter of degrees. Would you hand over your life savings for safekeeping to someone who said: “you can trust me, I am the least dishonest person you have ever seen”? And I have a bridge to sell too.