People had turned away from the fundamental principles of a civil society”–liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress”–and faith in reason to embrace “the forces of the unconscious, of unthinking dynamism and of pernicious creativity,” which rejected everything intellectual. Fed by those tendencies and carried by a “gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking,” National Socialism pursued “a politics of the grotesque . . . replete with Salvation Army allures, reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.”
—Thomas Mann, October 1930.
I’ve been following U.S. politics closely for thirty years. It’s been
sort of a civic hobby of mine, a fascination with the process of
representative democracy.
Election nights always felt to me like a celebration of sorts, even
when my side lost. The majesty of our shared Constitution stood proud
and resolute over my disappointment or elation, a solid structure to
house and protect the nation’s differences. I fondly remember driving
home to the soothing voices of NPR hosts already announcing the
electoral votes of some important state on the East Coast. At home or
a neighbor’s house, I’d watch on the TV screen and, later, on my own
Internet browser, to see the states lighting up in their contrasting
colors.
The people were making their choices known. It was a wondrous act of
civic communion, being enacted in school cafeterias and grange halls
and church foyers across the country, one check box at a time. The
pundits and politicians and talk show hosts could only sit and watch
it happen, in all its unstoppable glory, just like everybody else.
Eventually, victors would stand beaming among cheers and losers would
wave sadly at their disappointed backers. Except for the drama and
unseemly judicial politics of Bush v. Gore in 2000, everybody
quickly found some gracious words for their opponents and promised to
work together for the good of the nation.
This time it’s different. The Republican Party’s nominee for our
nation’s highest office has conducted his campaign like an eight-year
old schoolyard bully, spewing out childish insults against not just
his opponent but seemingly everyone who dares to criticize him,
including fellow Republicans. As November 8 mercifully draws near,
with the polls showing him facing a humiliating landslide loss to a
tarnished and unpopular Democrat, he is lashing out with accusations
of a rigged election.
“The whole thing is one big fix,” “one big ugly lie,” he told his
crowd at a rally in North Carolina last week, after an extended heated
denial about “fabricated” sexual assault accusations, an assessment of
Hillary’s attractiveness as seen from behind (“She walks in front of
me . . . believe me, I wasn’t impressed”), some rounds of “lock her up”
chants, and a “get him outta here” protester eviction.
“This whole election is being rigged,” he said a day later in
Cincinnati, according to a Boston Globe article observing that
“Trump is now using the prospect of his loss to undermine faith in
democratic institutions.” If he loses (I will venture to say “when”),
some of his supporters “are even openly talking about violent
rebellion and assassination, as fantastical and unhinged as that may
seem.” It’s no exaggeration, judging from what one of those supporters
had to say:
“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in
prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a
50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic
nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of
office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of
bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take . . . . I would do
whatever I can for my country.”
Bowel Movement
Trump wrapped up his North Carolina speech by boasting, “This is a
movement like nobody’s ever seen in this country before.” He may be
right about that, unfortunately. I’m terrified for the future of this
country, because I’ve paid some attention to what’s happened elsewhere
in the past.
Democratic governments–technically, republics–are fragile civic
arrangements between people who agree to respect majority opinions
they may not share, to put up with a degree of regulations based on
those opinions. The agreement need not be unanimous, but the “consent
of the governed” cannot withstand even a strong minority who want to
see the whole thing torn down. Such minorities grow in number and
loudness when they see themselves being used as tools rather than
respected as fellow citizens. Those angry white men shoving protesters
and jeering and shouting themselves hoarse at Trump rallies have some
legitimate grievances.
But they’ve found an odd sort of champion in this tax-avoiding
billionaire who began his speech in North Carolina talking about
owning property there (no cheers for that line), peddles
Chinese-made clothes, and stiffs everyday people who do work for
him. The idea of him being a standard-bearer of the Religious
Right’s family values agenda is laughable, even without regard to his
change of heart about abortion. One of the most reasonable
explanations I’ve heard for Trump being the GOP candidate of the
huddled masses came from a friend of mine recently:
People are so stinking tired of the single party-like system that
services the elites. There was no conspiracy to put him there. He saw
the disenfranchisement people were feeling and capitalized on it.
The only major party that will put up a candidate that is a true
outsider is the Republican Party because they didn’t implement a
superdelegate system like the democrats did back in the
seventies. And the only way an outsider will win the Republican
nomination against the established machine is to be highly
controversial, because it’s the only to get attention without having
an unlimited spigot of money.
“Controversy is the only way to stand out against the kleptocracy,” my
friend concludes. “Nice people do not win in this scenario.”
Before I respond to that with some glib analogy about getting rid of
bedbugs with a propane canister left open overnight plus a match, I
must admit to having actually cheered Donald Trump’s ascent in the
Republican primaries. It was clear from the infantile antics and
debate-night food fights that he would be the easiest for the Democrat
to defeat. For once, the GOP’s elites and billionaire patrons found
themselves unable to ease in a genteel puppet like Jeb! to keep the
money funneling upward, the environmental regulations disappearing,
and everything from Social Security to our national forests going
private. Certainly, they could find a way to manipulate Trump into
doing most of that for them, too, if it came to that.
But, as I breezily told a few friends, there simply was no way Trump
would win in November. Relax, I said, it won’t even be close. Now we
have this glorious festering moron as the GOP nominee.
Well, at various times since then, I wound up abandoning all that
confidence. Compulsively checking and rechecking the latest projection
at FiveThirtyEight.com, back in September, I wondered how the hell this
guy was running even in the polls. (Still checking: The polls-only
forecast now gives him a 11.4% probability of winning, not low enough
for my liking.) There were a few very dark nights of the soul when I
wished the only thing the name Donald Trump meant to me was
something vague about a combed-over windbag who churned his way
through a few wives and bankruptcies and fired people on TV.
Bonfire of the Vanity
Allow me to simply give voice to a deep-seated revulsion that has
welled up from too many hours now spent in the vile virtual company of
that scowling and smirking face, the hand waving and hog calling that
passes for campaign speeches, the volleys of infantile insult bombs
launched on Twitter: Donald Trump is a proven serial liar, an immature
schoolyard bully, a pathetic attention-craving egotist, and a truly
gaping asshole.
“This is not how decent human beings behave,” the First Lady said last
week after gagging along with the rest of us on the recorded voice of
“a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually
predatory behavior, and actually bragging about kissing and groping
women, using language so obscene that many of us were worried about
our children hearing it when we turn on the TV.” This, as she said, is
not normal.
So just what is just going on inside that large orange head? The
behavior is so unseemly, so far beyond the pale, that people naturally
have been tempted to make psychological speculations. A Google search
for “trump mental illness,” run through an anonymizer with my cookies
cleared to avoid biasing the algorithm, yields a million hits.
The top result is of an article in The Atlantic by Psychology
professor Dan P. McAdams, entitled “The Mind of Donald Trump.” McAdams
found he could “discern little more than narcissistic motivations and
a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost.” It is,
he said, “as if Trump has invested so much of himself in developing
and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing left over
to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation.” A
couple of other psychologists he cited had similar impressions:
Asked to sum up Trump’s personality for an article in Vanity Fair,
Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard, responded, “Remarkably
narcissistic.” George Simon, a clinical psychologist who conducts
seminars on manipulative behavior, says Trump is “so classic that I’m
archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no
better example” of narcissism. “Otherwise I would have had to hire
actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”
Now, this was all written back in June, before Trump announced his VP
pick by spending nearly a half hour standing by himself on stage,
“delivering a long and improvised riff that emulated his rallies
instead of a traditional vice-presidential debut” and then finally
getting to the matter of talking about somebody else. Before he
reacted to his opponent’s criticism of his past treatment of Miss
Universe 1996 with a series of tweets about a non-existent “sex tape,”
her “terrible” past, her being “disgusting” and a “con.” And of course
before he was heard saying in the tape that disgusted so many of us
and at long last eliminated the possibility of his presidency, “You
can do anything” when you’re a star.
McAdams and those he quotes don’t go so far as to connect the
narcissism they see with mental illness, but even what they’ve said
has raised criticism from their peers. In August, the president of the
American Psychiatric Association “reminded her organization’s members
of the so-called Goldwater Rule, ‘which prohibits psychiatrists from
offering opinions on someone they have not personally evaluated.’” It
seems that Barry Goldwater so disturbed 1,100 psychiatrists during his
1964 campaign that they told a survey taker he “was psychologically
unfit to be president.”
Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke
University, is one of the critics of such armchair psychiatry.
(McAdams, Gardner, and Simon are psychologists, not psychiatrists, for
what that’s worth.) She writes that Trump “most certainly does not
have a Personality Disorder” (isn’t that a diagnosis of sorts?), but
she certainly isn’t a fan:
This does not make Trump fit to be president, not by any means. He
must be by far the least suitable person ever to run for high office
in the US completely disqualified by habitual dishonesty, bullying,
bravado, bloviating ignorance, blustery braggadocio, angry
vengefulness, petty pique, impulsive unpredictability, tyrannical
temper, fiscal irresponsibility, imperial ambitions, constitutional
indifference, racism, sexism, minority hatred, divisiveness, etc.
Fine, so let’s all agree not to label Donald Trump as being mentally
ill. Let’s agree that even a psychiatrist couldn’t ethically make a
diagnosis from afar. The pattern-recognition circuits in my brain
still light up uncomfortably when I read what Wikipedia has to say
about Narcissistic personality disorder, which it calls
a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated
feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a
lack of understanding of others’ feelings. People affected by it
often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success,
or about their appearance. They often take advantage of the people
around them.
People with the disorder “are characterized by their persistent
grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, and a disdain and lack of
empathy for others,” Wikipedia says. “These individuals often display
arrogance, a sense of superiority, and power-seeking behaviors.” This
isn’t just self-confidence gone into overdrive. Rather, narcissists
“typically value themselves over others to the extent that they
disregard the feelings and wishes of others and expect to be treated
as superior regardless of their actual status or achievements.” They
“may exhibit fragile egos, an inability to tolerate criticism, and a
tendency to belittle others in an attempt to validate their own
superiority.” To “protect the self at the expense of others,”
narcissists “tend to devalue, derogate, insult, [and] blame others and
they often respond to threatening feedback with anger and
hostility.”
If I’d been presented with that description before reading anything
about narcissism and then asked to provide an example of someone whose
recent behavior matches it, I know what my answer would be. And
considering what’s at stake for the entire country, that bothers me a
lot. This isn’t just about avoiding drama from unfortunate relatives
or poorly chosen friends.
More descriptions are found in a new book by some Jungian
psychologists, entitled A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the
Era of Donald Trump. The editors and contributors know better than to
say something like “Trump is a pathological narcissist,” and their
publisher starts things off with this stern preface:
Let us be clear: The contributors, editors, and publisher have not
engaged in diagnosis of any public figures mentioned in the pages
that follow. Specifically, we are not claiming that any public
figures or leaders mentioned have been diagnosed with Narcissistic
Personality Disorder (NPD). To establish a diagnosis of any
psychological disorder requires individual assessment by a qualified
mental health professional. Proper diagnosis is reached only after
thorough, individual diagnostic evaluation.
Then, turning the page to their “Introduction to Narcissistic
Personality Disorder,” they say:
The extreme utterances and behaviors displayed by candidates like
Mr. Trump may have shined a light on narcissism and perhaps given
society a chance to confront this phenomenon head-on. We wish to
reiterate that we are not proposing that Donald Trump suffers from
Narcissistic Personality Disorder, nor are we proposing he does
not. Yet we wish to thank him and other candidates in the 2016
presidential election for the opportunity to take an honest look in
the mirror and confront our individual and collective narcissism.
So, just what is this Narcissistic Personality Disorder they say
Trump may or may not suffer from? Their answer refers to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–the “Psychiatrist’s Bible,” 5th
edtition:
The DSM 5 defines people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder as
having very specific attributes. They show enduring patterns of
grandiosity, an absence of empathy, and a need for being admired by
others throughout adulthood. People with grandiosity have a sense of
superiority, viewing themselves as better than others. They often
look at others with a sense of disdain and perceive others as
inferior themselves. They see themselves as unique and overly
important and often exaggerate their achievements. Lacking empathy,
they are unmoved by others’ suffering. They have difficulty seeing
how their actions can harm others or how someone might feel in a
particular situation.
To meet the criteria for NPD, the DSM 5 requires at least 5 out of
the following 9 characteristics to be met: grandiosity; fantasies of
unlimited power and success; sees self as “special” and only
associates with others of high status; needs admiration; has a sense
of entitlement; is interpersonally exploitative; lacks empathy; is
envious of others; or appears arrogant.
Even people who fail to meet 5 of the 9 the diagnostic criteria for
Narcissistic Personality Disorder, those said to have narcissistic
traits, may experience difficulties in the way they relate to the
world. The distinction between narcissistic traits and narcissistic
personality disorder is sometimes subtle and difficult to make.
In the next chapter, the editors let their feelings be known about the
Goldwater Rule, saying “it seems ill-conceived that laypersons with no
formal training or experience should be free to opine on the
psychology of public figures aspiring to high office, while trained,
experienced professionals are gagged.” Then they go on provide some
examples of “Donald Trump’s own words [that] are often used to fashion
impressions about his ‘political psychological profile,’” which are
amusing but almost quaint in view of the awful things Trump has said
and tweeted in the months since they compiled their list.
One uncredentialed but sort-of expert on narcissism is not being
restrained at all in his assessment. Sam Vaknin was interviewed by the
conservative American Thinker back in March and said, “Trump is the
most perfect example I have ever come across of a malignant and,
probably, psychopathic narcissist.” Sam Vaknin is a fascinating
character because he describes himself as a narcissist, an
assessment shared by some critics who feel he has gained too much
attention in the field.
In response to the question of whether Trump
would represent a significant danger as President of the United
States, Vaknin says:
You just have to look at Trump’s business history to extrapolate
America’s future under a President Trump. Narcissists are unstable
and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction (with other people
usually paying the heft of the price). Narcissists tend to be
divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled,
raging, incoherent, judgement-impaired, and irrational. Narcissists
are junkies: they are addicted to attention (“Narcissistic Supply”)
and will go to any extreme to secure it. Narcissists are liars,
confabulators, and miserable failures (although some of them, like
Trump, are geniuses at disguising the fact that they are, in fact,
losers). Is this the kind of person you want in the White House?
Though there is something a bit creepy about Vaknin’s scholarly forays
into the very area where he claims to have mental issues (even running
message boards where victims of narcissists have gone to get help),
that certainly doesn’t make him seem more sympathetic toward
narcissists. Here are some gems quoted from his book Malignant Self
Love, the tenth edition published in March 2015. Note that this was
all written before Trump announced his candidacy, so it’s not directed
at him or his behavior during this train wreck of a campaign:
-
The fuel of the narcissist’s rage is spent mainly on vitriolic
verbal send-offs directed at the (often imaginary) perpetrator of
the (oft-innocuous) “offence”.
-
The narcissist wittingly or not utilizes people to buttress his
self-image and to regulate his sense of self-worth. As long and in
as much as they are instrumental in achieving these goals, he holds
them in high regard, they are valuable to him. He sees them only
through this lens. This is a result of his inability to love others:
he lacks empathy, he thinks utility, and, thus, he reduces others to
mere instruments.
-
He regards and treats people as though they were objects: exploits
and discards them. He mistreats people around him by asserting his
superiority at all times; by being emotionally cold or absent; by
constantly bickering, verbally humiliating, incessantly (mostly
unjustly) criticizing; and by actively rejecting or ignoring them,
thus provoking uncertainty.
-
He is capricious, infantile and emotionally labile and immature. The
narcissist is frequently a 40 years-old brat.
-
The narcissist needs and requires an audience to applaud, approve,
affirm, recoil, admire, adore, fear, or even detest him. He craves
the attention and depends on the Narcissistic Supply that only
others can provide.
-
Mostly, the narcissist prefers to be feared or admired rather than
be loved. He describes himself as a “strong, no nonsense” man, who
is able to successfully weather extraordinary losses and exceptional
defeats and to recuperate. He expects other people to respect this
image that he projects.
-
Narcissists are pathological liars. This means that they are either
unaware of their lies, or feel completely justified and at ease when
lying to others.
Yes, these are selected quotations from a large, somewhat rambling
book. Yes, it is possible to quote-mine negative traits from such
books about most anyone you don’t like. No, we can’t know Trump’s
internal mental state from what we see in public. But the comparisons
still jump out at me and give me the creeps.
I do not want anyone who has acted anything remotely like this in
the Oval Office. And I really can’t imagine why you would vote for
such a man–no matter what party he’s claiming to be in, no matter
what your grievances or politics, or how much you don’t like his
opponent.
What’s Left to Believe?
One thing I will not hesitate to call Donald Trump is a liar. The
media danced around the issue of his obvious falsehoods for a while
and then finally started calling them what they are.
“Virtually all of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods directly bolstered a powerful
and self-aggrandizing narrative depicting him as a heroic savior for a
nation menaced from every direction,” Maggie Haberman and Alexander
Burns said in their summary of a “week of whoppers” before the first
debate. His “version of reality allows for few, if any, flaws in
himself.” Operating inside that bubble, Trump imagined a crowd
chanting “Let him speak!” after being told not to get political in a
church, opposed the Iraq war despite no record of anything but pro-war
remarks from him ever being found, and slandered his opponent by
blaming her for starting the smear he kept up for years about
Obama’s birthplace.
Someone who knows about this better than most is Tony Schwartz, the
ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal who “spent 18 months in the 1980s
interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump.” He feels “a deep sense of
remorse” for contributing “to presenting Trump in a way that brought
him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” The book
is really a work of fiction, he says, and ought to be titled The
Sociopath. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz says of the
interview subject he said regularly exaggerated, had no attention
span, and whose need for attention is such that he’d run for “emperor
of the world” if he could.
Trump’s own lawyers didn’t even seem to believe him. Two of them would
meet him together “so we don’t have a problem of people lying.” He is,
after all, “an expert at interpreting things,” as one of them
delicately put it. “Donald says certain things and then has a lack of
memory.”
It Matters
Volker Ullrich describes the atmosphere at a rally led by a man who
was still on the far margins of power, trying to gain a foothold. It
was the evening of February 24, 1920, and
around 2,000 people squeezed into the Hofbräuhaus’s main first-floor
hall. Hitler was the second speaker, but he was the one who really
got the crowd whipped up with his attacks on the Treaty of
Versailles, Erzberger and, above all, the Jews. The police transcript
of the event read: “First chuck the guilty ones, the Jews, out and
then we’ll purify ourselves. (Enthusiastic applause.) Monetary fines
are no use against the crimes of fencing and usury. (Beatings!
Hangings!) How shall we protect our fellow human beings against this
band of bloodsuckers? (Hang them!)”
“Audience sizes ranged from 800 to 2,500,” but “in the second half of
1920, levels of 3,000 were reached.” The goal of the speaker at this
point “was to attract attention to his still relatively small party
and secure its place in the public sphere. ‘Who cares whether they
laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?’ Hitler
wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘The point is that they talk about us and
constantly think about us.’”
He was still being careful about how he said things, but he wasn’t
making a secret of his despicable views. Even
in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler
speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any
doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews. But hardly
anyone seems to have disapproved. On the contrary, storms of applause
greeted precisely the most anti-Semitic passages of Hitler’s
speeches, strongly suggesting that they were the source of much of
the speaker’s appeal. When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from
Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience
were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the racist
wishful thinking of a fully homogenous ethnic community.
Making comparisons between Trump and Hitler (Googling “trump hitler”:
32,700,000 results) is problematic for a number of reasons, perhaps
primarily the fact that Trump has never been in a position of
power. In 1920, Hitler wasn’t, either. He hadn’t killed anyone yet or
even broken any laws. But he was already making it known that there
was an entire group of people he didn’t want to have in the country,
and a small segment of the population was cheering him for saying it.
We are not yet seeing a militia of armed thugs marching in the streets
for a political strongman. Trump has boasted that he alone can fix
ISIS, has threatened to lock up his political opponent, and doesn’t
seem to care about the Geneva Conventions when it comes to killing the
families of terrorists, but he is not yet demanding the entire power
of the state.
Yet the Donald is leaving us plenty of things to be concerned
about. Imagine our country thirteen years from now–the length of time
between Hitler’s first Munich rallies and his accepting the
designation of Chancellor from an aged and wishful-thinking Paul von
Hindenberg. Are those good jobs coming back to the middle class? Are
the wild-eyed jihadists going to stop massacring people in shopping
malls and marketplaces? Is the planet going to stop warming and
flooding and creating refugees from hot places teeming with Muslims
and Mexicans?
When do the irresponsible words start shift into actions? The people
showing up at Trump rallies have plenty of weapons in their basements,
and I’d bet a lot of them would eagerly sign up for deportation
patrols if they thought they could get away with it.
The classic definition of the state, provided by the German
sociologist Max Weber, is the institution that seeks to monopolize
legitimate violence. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, Hitler sought
to discredit the Weimar Republic by demonstrating that it could not,
in fact, do this. His armed guards, known as the SA and SS,
functioned before his takeover of 1933 as de-monopolizers of
violence. When they beat opponents or started brawls, they were
demonstrating the weakness of the existing system.
Consider who we have asking for our votes, right now: a man who has
praised Putin for his “very strong control over a country.” That’s the
kind of leader Trump would like to be, in the assessment of Danielle
Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think
tank. Trump’s “instincts are authoritarian, and dangerous,” she told
the New York Times.
“His smile masks a hunger he cannot contain,” Alex Castellanos wrote
more than a year ago, a conservative who was against Trump before
being a conservative against Trump was cool. “He does not believe
federal power is too removed from our lives to control our lives. He
does not believe our factory-like government fails because it is
trying to do too much, not too little. Instead, he appears to believe
this: Lesser people than he are running things. And power should rest
not with the people, but with him.”
His claim that Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly preside over the
lawsuits against his sham of a “University” because of his Mexican
heritage has been widely denounced as racist, but the trouble goes
beyond that. “Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was
Mexican and seemed to issue a threat,” Adam Liptak summarized in the
New York Times, then quoting David Post, a retired law professor:
This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not
respect the judiciary.
You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual
cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to
be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That
is his constitutional obligation.
The man wants to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely
negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots
of money.” Negative articles–verboten. “We’re going to open up
libel laws, and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never
got sued before.”
He has “called for the broad use of the contentious stop-and-frisk
policing strategy in America’s cities,” the New York Times reported
last month, “embracing an aggressive tactic whose legality has been
challenged and whose enforcement has been abandoned in New York.”
Trump’s “vision of the presidency is an American strongman working on
behalf of the little guy, who by implication cannot take care of
himself,” writes Jay Cost at the conservative Weekly Standard. At
one point in the first debate, “Trump criticized Clinton for not
mentioning the phrase ‘law and order.’ But where, from Trump, was any
talk about liberty, or the Constitution, or limited government?” Cost
asks. “Nowhere, of course because these are not values that are
central to his way of thinking.”
To borrow Jacob Weisberg’s memorable assessment, we have one candidate
who is running for President and another who is running for
Dictator.
One last thing: Please don’t give me any of that tired Christian “vote
your values” bullshit. Not now, not with this candidate. Valerie
Tarico commented, “Christian devotion to Trump is exposing the moral
vacancy at the heart of many Christian churches and leaders (and their
member/followers), for whom the religion of low taxes trumps the
religion of caring for the least of these.”
Believers might consider the example of Karl Tervo, a Christian I
respect and occasionally interact with on Twitter:
I don’t pretend to know Donald Trump’s heart, but I can see how he
lives his life, the words that he chooses to use, and how he treats
other people. Matthew 3:8 says, “Therefore bear fruit in keeping with
repentance . . .” (NASB). By this measure, which is admittedly
subjective since I can’t see into his heart, Mr. Trump does not seem
to be heeding the words of Christ. Many American Christians will eat
up the words of politicians who profess faith, especially those on
the right. He purposely makes racist comments both against Black
people and Jews. American Christians will also use the Supreme Court
as a reason for voting for Trump, but how exactly does anybody know
what the man will do. He’s changed his mind countless times,
sometimes within speeches, so that line of reasoning is a nonstarter for me.
Tervo is voting for Evan McMullin, a Mormon who shares his opposition
to abortion. “This election has been a watershed moment for me,” he
told me. “Never again will I blindly pull the lever for the GOP, but
rather I’ll more rigorously investigate the candidates for the
particular office.”
———
“Trump told us who he was, showed us who he was, again and again,”
Ezra Klein says. “The test here is not of his decency, but of our
own.” It matters who sits in that Oval Office on our behalf, and it
matters to me who would vote to put Donald Trump in that exalted
place. That really matters to me quite a lot, I’m afraid.
Once when I was deep into my study of the German language, I made the
acquaintance of somebody who spoke it fluently. It was a fun and
worthwhile relationship between teacher and student, and one day I
went to her house to pick up a Luther Bible her husband had brought
back from Germany for me. While sitting on their couch, I saw some
light from a nook in the corner of the living room and noticed that
she was sitting not on the end of the couch opposite me but near the
middle, in a way that kept me from scooting over and seeing whatever
was producing the light. That got me curious, and I invented an excuse
to get up and move to the side of the room where I could see just what
was over there.
It turned out to be a large gold-framed portrait of Adolf Hitler with
a light shining on it. Red swastika flags stuck out proudly from the
wall on both sides.
I never spoke with her again.
Notes
