Maher has been ridiculed for the warmth with which he described Trump—his laughter and all that. That kind of thing is sometimes accompanied by complaints about “humanizing” or “normalizing” Trump.

The “humanizing” and “normalizing” stuff has always been irritating to me. There is no need to humanize or to normalize Donald Trump, who is as normal as diabetic amputation and as human as a school shooting …

Here is a thing I read frequently in my correspondence: “You just hate Trump.” But I do not hate Trump—Trump is not good enough to hate. One must esteem something a little bit, at least, to hate it, because you cannot hate something that doesn’t have a moral endowment sufficient for being hated. It is not that Trump does not represent a serious phenomenon, but Trump is serious the way mosquitos are serious: Mosquito bites will kill something on the order of a million people this year, just as they did last year and will next year. When sharks are having a really big year, they kill half a dozen people worldwide, whereas mosquitos stack up corpses from the floors to the rafters around the world. But you cannot hate a mosquito—you can only swat him.

My feeling for Trump is not hatred but contempt. Contempt is not a particularly admirable emotion, and it is one that a more enlightened kind of man would resist better than I do, even—especially!—when confronted with that which is genuinely contemptible.

Kevin D. Williamson