This weekend, DeSantis was in Douglas County a deep red, tiny rural backwater in western Nevada that abuts California. There are about 50,000 in the county and DeSantis was in Gardnerville, the biggest town, which shares some streets with Minden, the county seat. FDR won the county twice; LBJ beat Goldwater and Obama beat McCain in 2008. Other than those 4 outliers, the county has been GOP-territory since the late 1800s, although the voters went for gay marriage legalization in 2020— by a small margin: 17,051 (52.3%) to 15,548 (47.7%). Señor Trumpanzee won the county both times he ran. (He also won the county in the 2016 GOP caucuses.) In 2020 he beat Biden 21,630 (63.38%) to 11,571 (33.91%).
Does Meatball think he can make headway there? Neil Vigdor went to check out his event there during which Meatball tried to persuade Republican voters still loyal to Trump that the party’s formula for winning elections was beyond its shelf life. He never mentioned Trump’s name— even though Trump had just been indicted on serious criminal charges— but he “sought to draw a not-so-subtle contrast between himself and the former president… describ[ing] last year’s midterm elections as another disappointment in a string of defeats for the party, while touting his more than 1.2 million-vote margin of victory in his re-election last November. ‘We’ve developed a culture of losing in this party,’ DeSantis said, adding, ‘You’re not going to get a mulligan on the 2024 election.’” Did they fall for that?
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Vigdor that “DeSantis is a proven liar and fraud. That’s why he’s collapsing in the polls— both nationally and statewide. He should be careful before his chances in 2028 completely disappear.” I don’t know if Peter Wehner— a right-wing NeverTrumper who worked in the administrations of both Bushes and for Reagan— is supporting DeSantis or not, just that he’s a pro-gun, anti-Palestinian, anti-Choice wing-nut who opposes Trump. Yesterday, The Atlantic published another in a long line of his Trump-is-immoral columns: Morality Is For Trump What Colors Are To The Colorblind. It was an attack on Trump supporters who “still know right from wrong.” Hmmm… if they still know right from wrong, how is it possible they are Trump supporters?
“Trump,” wrote Wehner, “doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories… 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 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.”
A conservative ideologue like Wehner is draught that for all Trump’s obvious shortcomings he is still around 30 points ahead of Meatball and he wrings his hands about Trump “having transformed the Republican Party in his own image in ways that exceed even what Ronald Reagan did. His imprint is on the party in a thousand different ways. Tens of millions of Americans see Trump as their angel of vengeance, and they can’t wait for the second act to get started.”
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, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. 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 made hush-money payments to a porn star. He instigated a violent attack on the Capitol and attempted to overturn an election. He was impeached twice. And 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.
If Trump’s malice is obvious, what’s behind it is more difficult to assess. In 2016, the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote a psychological portrait of Trump for The Atlantic, which he later expanded into a book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams describes Trump as “psychologically singular,” a man who “lacks an inner story to provide his life with temporal continuity, purpose, and meaning. He is the episodic man, living (and fighting) in the moment.” And that moment is free of ethical considerations and ethical constraints.
“Trump is like the alpha chimp who is always playing the short game, a brute-force game, to win at all costs,” McAdams claims. Trump himself said years ago, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
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.
In his 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will, one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half century, wrote that “the purpose of politics is to facilitate, as much as is prudent, the existence of worthy passions and the achievement of worthy aims.” Will was channeling Aristotle, who 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.”
That is an extremely complicated and difficult task, but a worthy and ennobling one. There is dignity in the political vocation, which is why many of us went into politics in the first place.
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. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.
Many millions of Americans responded, determined that their country become more decent, more humane, more just. We are now in mid-story; none of us knows quite how it will end. An extraordinary drama is playing out, and each of us has a role to play in shaping the outcome.
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