Trump 2.0: A Sick Moral Slum

Anyone outside of the most loyal MAGA base realizes that the Felon lies constantly about virtually everything.  The lies range to far fetched claims against political rivals to to claiming to know nothing about things he and/or his minions have done or set in motion. The lies eventually become a tangled web and set the stage for the Felon and his cruel lieutenants to get tripped up in their gyrations to keep the lies flowing.   Add to this the regime's horrific treatment of undocumented immigrants - with ICE and ICE Barbie, the cruelty seems to be the goal - and now apparent willingness to commit murder and war crimes (seemingly to please elements of the MAGA base and the Felon's desire to be a strongman) and the larger picture of the regime is one of utter moral bankruptcy.  A column in the Washington Post (I rarely view this news outlet and canceled by subscription when Bezos sold out to the Felon) by George Will - who I often disagree with - looks at the moral bankruptcy that defines the Felon and his foul regime of  incompetents, amoral individuals, and sycophants.   Here are highlights:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.

No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. . . . the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.

Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.

The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.

Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus . . . 

Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.

The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!”