Watch author Alice Walker explain Donald Trump's racist envy of Barack Obama

Renowned public intellectual Alice Walker explained President Donald Trump's racially-based envy of President Barack Obama during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Beat with Ari Melber" on Tuesday.

Walker has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction plus the National Book Award and is a longtime feminist and civil rights leader.

"Walker is now confronting the Trump era head-on," Melber noted.

The host played a tape of Trump saying, "I went to an Ivy League school, I'm very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words."

"What does it tell you that it's important to him to be perceived as so smart?" Melber asked.

"It tells me that he knows he probably is not and he has an inferiority complex," Walker replied.

"And that's very sad, but it's even sadder that we elected him to lead," she continued. "We definitely need a very different kind of leader, and, in fact, we actually need to lead ourselves, and until we do, we probably won't get very far."

"Does a feeling of inferiority or a lack of self-affirmation or love, does that make people more dangerous when they come into contact with power or money?" Melber asked.

"Yes, because there's always envy -- a need to measure up, you know," she explained. "I mean, you can see that between him and Barack Obama. I think the envy there was so blatant."

"That Donald Trump envied Barack Obama even though he started out with more than Barack Obama?" the host asked.

"That's part of the problem, that he had everything and Barack is a black man who is supposed to have nothing," she replied. "And it's very hard to take, but the answer is not to make us all suffer, it's to go and improve yourself."

Watch: