Why Do So Many Continue to Support Trump?

One of the hardest things for me is trying to wrap my head around why so many Americans - including quite a few that I once thought were decent, moral people - continue to support the Felon and his hideous regime.  The man is utterly bankrupt morally and would seem to be the embodiment of the seven deadly sins.   On top of this, his regime's policies ranging from masked ICE agents seizing people without any shred of due process to the funding cuts to social programs and heath care coverage in the "big beautiful bill" that will actively harm millions are similarly devoid of morality, especially since the cuts are being made to give huge tax breaks to the obscenely wealthy.   Yet the MAGA base and many Republicans (many who live in a fantasy world where they pretend the GOP is still the party of Reagan) not only support the Felon and cheer for his horrific policies and look away when it comes to his immorality.  I saw a post online that looked at the phenomenon:

We could talk about the convictions. The 34 felonies. The $450 million in penalties. The attempted coup. The lies, the grift, the cult. But none of it cuts deeper than what so many refused to see from the beginning: The women. 

E. Jean Carroll told the world that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room. A jury believed her. They didn’t call it “he said, she said.” They called it sexual abuse. Then, in a second trial, they added $83 million in defamation damages, because even after the verdict, Trump kept lying about her. 

Jessica Leeds. Rachel Crooks. Natasha Stoynoff. Kristin Anderson. Jill Harth. Summer Zervos. Cathy Heller. Amy Dorris. Lisa Boyne. Temple Taggart. Karena Virginia. Mindy McGillivray. Cassandra Searles. Tasha Dixon. And dozens more. Each one accused Donald J. Trump of sexual misconduct, groping, assault, or rape. Some were contestants. Some were reporters. Some were guests at Mar-a-Lago. Their stories weren’t whispers — they were shouted. Sworn. Testified. Published. Mocked. 

And America shrugged. Trump didn’t deny the behavior. He bragged about it. . . . But we kept looking away.  

This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about what we tolerate. It’s about what we’re still willing to excuse — as long as the stock market stays high or the libs stay mad.  If this man were your neighbor, your teacher, your boss, or your pastor, he’d be gone. But in America, if you’re powerful enough, we’ll ignore everything — even rape — if you say what we want to hear.

I like to believe that once upon a time, Americans would not have tolerated this kind of behavior or individual.  Recall how Bill Clinton faced impeachment for a blow job and Republicans screamed about the importance of personal behavior and "family values." Looking back, that entire circus looks so quaint and ridiculous in the face of what we see with the Felon virtually every day, particularly now with the DOJ and FBI claiming there is no evidence of an Epstein client list.  What has become of the nation's morality when millions support abject cruelty towards migrants, the construction of modern day concentration camps, and knowingly harming the poor and less fortunate, especially children.  A long piece in The Atlantic tries to determine how we got to this horrible place where a sense of common morality and any sense of the importance of the common good have been lost:

There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?

I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. . . . It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.

The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.

Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. . . . . By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing.

If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. . . . . “I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do—play it right and with respect.”

Sandberg’s speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives.

Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law.

Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary.

I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles.

I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?

Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom.

How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. . . . . in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much.

But the moral relativism of the 1980s and ’90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.

Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. . . . today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants.

Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.

We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.