belittler

Now, confronted with hard truths about the disease, his administration’s muddled response and the country’s economic collapse, Trump is trying to switch hats from belittler in chief to wartime commander.

He knows that everlasting concern with perfection in trifles is a belittler of souls; that correcting sentences and paragraphs and Latin and German exercises and algebraic problems and geometrical proofs is poor food for a human mind.