The Moral Depravity of Donald Trump - and His Enablers

The Founding Fathers - despite their failings and irreconcilable positions on "right life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" even as supporting slavery - over all had a view of working for  a common good and a sense of morality.   Though hardly perfect and despite personal failings they had a larger, grander vision.  Fast forward to today and we see one of the two major political parties in thrall to a man who is the antithesis to what the Founder sought and embodies the type of demagogue the Founders feared when they established the Electoral College (which sadly failed its intended purpose in 2016). Donald Trump is a man who is morally depraved and cares about no one but himself and his own gratification and ego. Yet we see evangelicals  - a demographic I have long viewed as defined by hypocrisy and animosity towards others - supporting Trump perhaps more then anyone else save perhaps white supremacists (the two groups largely overlap each other).  Meanwhile, Trump's enablers within the GOP, many of whom know better but care only about pleasing the MAGA base continue to swear fealty to Trump regardless of what crimes he commits.  A piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at the moral bankruptcy that defines Trump.  Here are highlights: 

Earlier this week, Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami on charges that he willfully retained documents containing some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and obstructed justice when federal officials tried to retrieve them.

Trump was charged with more than three dozen criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law. The indictment is a chilling and devastating portrait of a president who betrayed his country. But it comes as no surprise. It constitutes only the latest link in an extraordinary chain of corruption.

Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.

But what’s true of Trump isn’t true of the majority of his enablers. They see the colors that Trump cannot. They still know right from wrong. But for a combination of reasons, they have consistently overridden their conscience, in some cases unwittingly and in some cases cynically. They have talked themselves into believing, or half-believing, that Trump is America’s martyr and America’s savior.

Trump’s behavior obviously speaks to his own character. But Trump’s behavior has also proved to be a test of the character of others—Republican politicians and voters, the GOP establishment and the evangelical movement. It’s proved to be a test of character for those who claim to be “constitutional conservatives” and “family values” advocates, for ethicists and public intellectuals, for right-wing commentators and party strategists.

With very few exceptions, and to varying degrees, they have failed it. They have turned against—or at the very least, at a crucial hour, they have failed to defend—ideals and institutions they once claimed to cherish. Donald Trump could not have so deeply wounded our republic without his enablers. It took a team effort.

And now here we are, eight summers after Trump announced his first bid for the presidency, and we find him facing 71 felony counts while still 30 points above his nearest GOP rival, having transformed the Republican Party in his own image in ways that exceed even what Ronald Reagan did.

The moral wreckage of Donald Trump’s presidency and post-presidency was predictable and even inevitable. The reason? Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.

In July 2016, I described Trump as temperamentally unfit to be president—erratic, unprincipled, unstable, obsessive, a serial liar, and a misogynist who made racist appeals and who suffered from what, at the time, I called a “personality disorder.” On the day after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote, . . . This isn’t going to end well.” It hasn’t.

The scope and seriousness of Trump’s misconduct over the past eight years is staggering. He has relentlessly promoted lies and conspiracy theories, brutalized and dehumanized his opponents, threatened prosecutors and judges, and used his pardon power to subvert the legal system. He was found liable in a civil case of sexual abuse and defamation. . . . he is the first former president to be indicted, not once but twice. More indictments are likely to come.

Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.

Whatever the precise nature of Trump’s psychological pathologies—McAdams says Trump is “way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create”—we can see for ourselves how they manifest: extreme narcissism, lack of empathy, feelings of persecution, grandiosity, and deceitfulness; impulsivity, shamelessness, remorselessness, and rage; a compulsive desire for attention, an obsessive need to dominate others, an eagerness to shatter social norms, and the belief that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him.

Aristotle, . . .  said in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.” . . . Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life.

In his first book as president of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Václav Havel offered his reflections on the nature and practice of politics. Is there a place for morality and simple decency in politics? Did his ideals and principles, forged through two decades of courageous opposition to totalitarianism, have a place in public life?

Havel believed they did, but he knew it was a struggle. . . . It is a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things. Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough. Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience.”

Trump has no conscience and neither do his Republican enablers.  As for evangelicals supporting Trump, they have put their own hypocrisy and moral depravity on display.