Rebuilding America’s Sense of Justice, Decency, and Honesty …

US President Donald J. Trump reacts after delivering his acceptance speech on the last night of the Republican National Convention on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, the United States, August 27, 2020. EPA-EFE / JIM LO SCALZO

Donald Trump’s moral measure has been “weighed, measured, and discovered deficient.” But even if he leaves, rebuilding the remains will be hard work.

First published in DM168

In just over two months, the end of the Donald Trump carnage may be near, replaced by a more normal and rational administration.

But despite everything that has happened since 2016, Trump may still win a second term. However, if it is the latter, Americans will witness the deepening degradation of the life, politics, and reputation of the nation in the eyes of the world.

Since becoming president, Trump has eviscerated a generation’s improved environmental protection and devastated the political landscape, turning every conceivable element of government into a series of rewards and punishments. It has been rewards for family, friends, and the corporate rich (including some massive tax cuts) and punishments for those with less influence.

Despite being the grandson of one immigrant and the husband of another, his immigration policies are deeply tainted with anti-foreigner racism, especially towards those whose faith or national origin has ties to Islam or towards young, caged children. And of course, there has been this fraudulent deception that Mexico would pay for a border wall to prevent Hispanic gangs from desecrating the country’s suburbs.

Dealing with lifelong allies has been years of intimidation, threats, and insults. As long as it wasn’t unfair trade, he was the sulky and shameful kind that governments didn’t spend enough on security and collective defense. At this point, foreign democratic leaders can hardly bear to even meet him at international gatherings.

But for the nation’s strategic opponents, it has been tragically different. There has been an inordinate reverence for Vladimir Putin, without regard for the security of the nation.

With the authoritarian leader of North Korea, it has been an exchange of “love letters”, even as Kim Jong-un’s nuclear ambitions continue unabated.

With his eccentric and dangerously personalized style of diplomacy, he has thrust forward, first trying to tempt Chinese ruler Xi Jinping with the “best chocolate cake ever”; they then followed with threats, punitive trade tariffs on imports (paid by the Americans), fanciful negotiations of trade deals, and then even more tariffs, but they never condemned Chinese human rights violations.

But its impact on America’s own national spirit has been even more corrosive. This president uses the language of a neighborhood bully hell-bent on beating up anyone who disagrees with his views. He is a man who delights to divide and belittle rather than unite.

Yes, of course, previous presidents used nasty obscenities in private. But they understood that a president’s public statements should reflect the truth, presidents should lead, comfort, and inspire, rather than mock, denigrate, or insult. Instead, Trump’s words taint the national conversation.

Worse still, his strident attacks on those with whom he disagrees (or when seeking political advantage through such attacks) have encouraged acolytes with less of a moral compass than the president’s to carry out acts of violence and brutality. even when he reassures them. they are “very fine people”.

By now, the outrage is mounting so much that it’s almost impossible to keep track of them, or even maintain a sense of outrage at them.

At this point, Trump’s effort to enlist the president of Ukraine on a political fishing expedition against his likely rival for the 2020 election looks like the faint glow of a meteor.

Although the moral emptiness and inability to lead of this president has manifested itself in recent weeks, everything so far has pointed towards this moment. Responding to an epidemic that will soon have killed 200,000 Americans and infected millions more, after first insisting that it would end in the spring, and even as his lackeys proclaim that the worst is over, the president’s judgment has been: “It is what it is”.

For this president, Covid-19 has been like a plague of mosquitoes, rather than a plague that has precipitated an economic catastrophe that rivals the Great Depression. Rather than relying on science and epidemiology, the president has spent months insisting that it was all China’s fault, hinting that they might even have created it in the service of improving their electoral chances in 2020.

In times of crisis, any other national leader would have addressed the nation, entrusted it and explained how challenging this pandemic is, but giving assurances that the government is working hard, despite the challenges. Instead, Americans listened to recommendations to take useless drugs for this disease or to inject themselves with household bleach.

But it is in dealing with America’s current racial agonies that this president has shown the most heinous aspects of his character. In the face of public outrage over the killings of unarmed Black men in cities across the country by local police forces, the president has been absent from leave for the causes of this discord, anger, and pain, much less any effort to lead the nation towards courtesy. Instead, there have been chants of “law and order” and threats to send the army to any city affected by demonstrations and marches.

In a kind of demonstration project, he ordered federal corrections officers, dressed in camouflage clothing, to enter Portland, increasing discord. And then there was Lafayette Square. In a park in front of the White House and on nearby streets, his gendarmes cleared the area so that the president could pose in front of a church, frowning on his face and the Bible in hand, as if he were an avenging angel. In response to the national outrage that followed, military commanders disassociated themselves from this, as if to say, “President Trump, you are alone in this.”

Unfortunately, you are not alone. Everything he does or says turns even more of the nation’s gold to scum. That is a strange alchemy; But reversing this and rebuilding a nation’s sense of justice, decency, and honor will be much more difficult to achieve, now that Donald Trump has done his best. DM