I Walk These Streets of Fire
Considering Morals in Trump’s America
The evening of the 2016 election, my wife Kate and I were glued to the tv, hoping for the best of two outcomes about which we were not excited. Hillary Clinton had the air of someone who walked around with an invisible political crown on her head and had not taken the lethality of her opponent seriously. Donald Trump was a court jester making a mockery of the genuine problems facing the dawning new century to give himself a boost and enhance his brand. Amazingly enough, neither of them got what they expected.
I held my nose when I voted for Hillary Clinton. My knee-jerk assessment of her has always been that she is overly hawkish and given to having an invertebrate’s sense of a spine. In that her chief goal was her belief she belonged in the presidency, here she shared the only common characteristic with Donald Trump: self-promotion. For Trump, it was to immortalize his own name further. For Clinton, it was to ascend to her rightful place in the political hierarchy of American power. I doubt either has felt a sense of service to others much in their life.
I wanted Bernie. Or Warren. Recently, I took a political test on Facebook, at my wife’s behest and mostly for amusement, and somehow scored out as a “socialist libertarian.” I suppose that meant I do not care what you do, but I want most of your money for the public good while you do it. Those quizzes, among so many other things like them up the food chain of public consumption of media, were part of the problem of conveniently categorizing Americans into easy to define groups to better play them for and against each other.
But I digress. Hillary is too much to the right of the political spectrum for my tastes. Her one saving grace, I felt, and was frequently called to defend in principle, was her malleability as a politician. She was always for or against something until she was against or for it. Many observers might conclude that not having strong opinions about every topic one could have a view on and sticking with them throughout a long life is a bad sign in a politician, but sometimes, it is the opposite. Hillary was such a creature.
She was anti-gay marriage. Then she was not. But what did she believe? I believe she wanted to be president and needed to get a few inconvenient steps out of the way first. Such as a senator of a state she barely knew anything about and had little political or cultural affinity for.
She used to be for universal healthcare. Aggressively so, and good for her. Is she now? No, because she was burned in that fight so badly, she never stepped foot in the not for profit debate again in any practical sense. What a powerful ally to have for that cause. She was 25 years ahead of her time on that issue, but sheepish to admit it when she could have expended political capital to do so in the 2016 election.
She does like bombing other countries. That has not changed.
All this is to say, Hillary’s willingness to be for or against what she perceives as the most vote-getting notion of the day is what makes a democratic republic a democratic republic. A president more so than senators, and the house representatives, must be above the momentary whims of the mob and respectful of the eternal nature of the governance of a free nation and the ‘self-evident’ logic used in its founding. But, they must also know that when it is time to sign the bill for this generation, sometimes the long gaze of a Jefferson or Hamilton, or the even longer gaze of Washington, must be avoided for more modern solutions. Hillary was the candidate for that job. Because she has no principles she holds so dear she could not change them for some other principles that better suit her current needs. Frankly, I considered this her most electable qualification. And, as it turns out, her prescient divining of the rise of Trump’s nation of Deplorables.
And then, there is the Donald. Donald John Trump. One of the most cretinous humans to ever disgrace the dirt upon which he walks. If at this point, my view of the sub-human excrement that took the human shape of the creature we call Donald John Trump is in any doubt, the forgoing article will not be pleasing to the eyes nor easing to the heart of a Trump aficionado, supporter, or one of his cultists.
There was likely no hope for him ever to be a good person. His father, Fred Trump, was also a repulsive man who spent his life building a New York real estate empire and aggressively cheating the taxman and dodging regulators. Not a shining beacon of morality for a young lad to learn the standards of basic humanity from. Trump’s formative mentor, Roy Cohn, cut his teeth helping Joe McCarthy witch-hunt Americans in the 1950s before blatant idiocy, alcohol, and ignominy eventually caused McCarthy to become a helpful description of everything that was wrong with Cold War America and rigidity in political thinking. As McCarthy fell, Cohn continued to slither through American legal life, landing in the orbit of Donald Trump, teaching him a lesson that has remained the core of his character to this day: never admit defeat, even if and especially if you were defeated: claim victory, sweep the details under the rug. Trump has, to the best knowledge of the public record, never admitted to defeat.
I am not even confident there is an -ism that we can apply to him, so vast is the scope of his amorality. Racist, sexist, chauvinist, the list could and should be endless. Trump is the most successful failure in modern American culture, having never succeeded at anything on his own without compromising or destroying the well-being, livelihood, and good standing of all those in his orbit. His only claim to being a self-made man is his style of pompous buffoonery has kept him in front of the cameras and microphones for decades. His is, as he has attested often, the greatest at everything doable by a human. None of that is true. Trump has the intellectual capacity of a proton, but he is a master of media manipulation.
Much like other laughable strongmen wannabes of times past, even temporarily effective chest puffers like Mussolini, he has mesmerized a vast swath of the electorate and empowered dark creatures to come out of the shadows to feed off his negative energies. While he huffs and puffs and blows the United States down, his enablers and sycophants, those who wanted to invade the government to collapse it and make it inefficient later to support mass privatization of services and earned benefits, crawl on their slimy underbellies into the halls of power. Their leader, the tortoise of power known as Mitch McConnell, has given up governance for putting grossly unqualified judges on lifetimes appointments to the federal bench. He does not care about the judgment of history; he lives in this lifetime. His legacy is secure: the fight to wrest control of the country from oligarchs and other ill-meaning power dons will take another lifetime. In Trump, who wants nothing more than something to call his accomplishment, McConnell found a puppet whose ego is too enormous and insecurities so vast that he is impossible not to manipulate.
Trump’s private life is, without a doubt, sordid. Day after day, as he moved away from a world where he could at least hide from the spotlight as his whims dictated, to the glaring light of the presidency, news of his past misdeeds have come back to haunt him again and again. Payoffs to women he slept with; divorces; manipulation of the immigration system to get his current wife and her family into the country. It is a list that would make blush the worst of the Gilded Age robber barons. It might even get a sideways glance of judgment from an 18th-century French aristocrat. His friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is not looking good for him either (or for the Clintons and many others.) It is not here I will baselessly accuse Trump of being a statutory rapist and possible child molester: those might be valid. It would not surprise me if he were Epstein’s second-best client after Prince Andrew. In all fairness, Trump does nothing surprising.
For an exhaustive, and exhausting, look at how he conducts himself as a businessman, I offer Plaintiff in Chief by James D. Zirin, a former lifelong New York prosecutor and Republican party voter until Trump came along. Zirin wanted to know what drives such a being as Trump and sought to analyze him in the way Zirin understands best, legally. The analysis is damning and insightful; Zirin seems bemused and flabbergasted at the legal maneuverings of Trump and his company. Within its pages, Plaintiff lays out the dots that lead from the old fights with the Pritzkers of Chicago, billionaire real estate folks, and Trump over who owes who what and when it was owed. Trump blusters in public and settles in court. He often loses. He uses the power of the court to shove people around; the cost of litigation is unwholesomely expensive. Trump has no compunction spending his family in to ruin for a good lawsuit. He also never forgets a grievance. His skin is so thin you can see invisible light through it.
An old lawsuit with the Pritzkers? Is it a wonder his ire and vitriol are pointed at J.B. Pritzker, the scion of that family? Trump would never help Illinois. Not with a Pritzker to settle scores with. By the end of April, Pritzker was suffering from a low 69% approval rating for his sane response to COVID-19. Garbage numbers ask any political observer.
If you found it unusual for a sitting president to have such strong, nonstop opinions about a sports league, do not be surprised to know that Trump has an old grudge with the NFL. In the kerfuffle over Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in probably the most respectful protest since Cindy Sheehan was damned by “real Americans” for daring to ask why her son had to die in a desert half a world away, Trump now had a way to weasel his way into the NFL. He was president. His view of being president is that he gets to boss everyone around.
In the 1980s, Zirin tells us, Trump was especially drunk on his ego, owning buildings, casinos, pageants, and various other business interests. He wanted more than anything to be an NFL club owner, to wear a Super Bowl ring, to get the Lombardi trophy photo. Solution? Sue the NFL. At issue, as was the case most of his life, Trump was so financially insolvent he existed on leveraging loans and money from less than legal sources, thus not meeting the NFL’s requirement for financial muster. Second, he owned casinos. This ownership was verboten with the NFL. Sports and gambling seemed to everyone else an obvious conflict of interest. Trump thought Eight Men Out was less a tale of fraud and more a blueprint for success. But the NFL wisely declined to get in bed with the syphilitic business empire of Trump.
Trump’s plan, instead of grounding himself in business realities, was to buy into the ill-fated United States Football League. One of those leagues not named the NFL destined to fail. He purchased the New Jersey Generals. Promptly, he filed aided by the devil’s own attorney Roy Cohn an anti-trust lawsuit. Alleging that the NFL dominated media markets and the USFL could not compete due to this imbalance, to court they went. Soon after, yet another judge had to toss yet another Trump lawsuit. The plan was to sue and try to get a settlement (remember litigation is expensive, settling is not: Trump’s chief legal strategy) from the NFL to merge the USFL with the NFL, thus making Trump the owner of the NFL Generals. The NFL had settled an old lawsuit with the American Football League (AFL) in the 1960s and absorbed them. Good for them, too bad for Trump. Later, in a moment of whimsy, he said he had a good time suing the NFL. “We had a good lawsuit.” James Zirin’s book has a legion of similar examples. Give it a read.
Now, as president, Trump could bring political pressure to bear on the NFL. That would be the league that inked a deal with the US Military in 2009 to show more active displays of patriotism on the field. Hence the giant flags, flyovers, and so on. Before that, players were not on the field for the national anthem. Patriotism and love of the military go down when your country is several years along in two unwinnable conflicts. The DOD went to the most American of all institutions, sadly not Christmas, the NFL to get people ok with blowing stuff up again. This practice was so egregious John McCain expressed concern with it in 2015. If McCain is expressing concern with patriotism and militarization of society, then the DOD went a bridge too far. Because of this bed they made, the NFL was a big target for the president. And he had a score to settle.
Even better for the dog-whistler in chief, Kaepernick was a person of color, was protesting the abuse of the thin blue line, and had a great hairstyle that most white people who supported Trump found wholly unacceptable. Was the NFL letting one of its players talk about the police? The nerve.
Trump took to his quill and parchment and sat long hours in contemplation of what he wanted to say to Americans on this profoundly troubling topic. At least, that was the dream of any sane person. Instead, we have Twitter. Suitable for Middle East revolutions, terrible for everything else. It also does not require a high commitment to grammar or vocabulary, so Trump no doubt assumed Jack Dorsey had created it just for him.
To summarize: Kneeling bad, standing right, standing, and saluting better. Goodell terrible for not firing them all! Despite decades of court battles about employment and contractor agreements, especially in the heavily unionized northeast, Trump seemed to think NFL players were at-will 7–11 workers. They are not. They have contracts; they have a union; they have employee rights. The NFL may have neglected to throw a “no protesting at the games” clause in their contracts, but controversy is good for ratings.
Using what I can only assume was detailed technical analysis, Trump concluded that real patriots were staying away in mass numbers both from stadiums and home viewing. Also, the games were boring. What glee he must have felt to finally stick a knife in the image of the NFL, an organization second only to Jesus in reverence to many people in the US. Americans devotedly worship both on Sunday.
As with every other fight he picks, he won by losing: his base adored his nonsense, while the rest of the world moved on to taking an interest in Kaepernick’s movement or continuing to be white and not care because it did not affect us. Kaepernick has deals with Nike, an up and coming boutique shoe company, and Disney, an art-house with real promise. Trump has historically low poll numbers. So, it goes.
In the subline of this article, I make a claim of high charge: being an ethical observer. It is easy to say I am moral; I am ethical; I am a good person; I am not a bad person. The titan that is the challenge behind those statements is living the meaning of those words. I cannot always claim to do so. Therefore the premise of this entire jeremiad against Trump and those who feed from his trough may seem disingenuous to some. That is an understandable position to take. It is a foolish person who stands askance at others and insists he or she is better than those around. Putting forward as evidence, at least as morsels of the total, when I do something I consider wrong or that I know others consider wrong whose values and affection I respect and desire, I know that I have done a wrong. The physical illness of wrongdoing permeates my body, the mood of self-belittlement clouds my thoughts. Without driving down the road of intensive analysis of this all, I am confident to say I know, sometimes from experience and sometimes from observation and intuition, that stealing, sexual assault, rape, corruption, cronyism, and the thousand small cuts of the world that Donald Trump inhabits are wrong.
It does not matter if Trump is the subject or not: his actions are wrong in anyone’s hands, be it an Obama or Clinton. Both of those people, while perhaps better humans, are as politicians compromised and corrupt in their ways. In ways that should be vigorously investigated and fairly reported. However, they and the rest of the living presidents are not the current occupant of that high office, nor did any of them give any rational person a moment’s hesitation that peace at the end of an election was a foregone conclusion.
Trump is not immoral or moral; he is amoral. He embodies psychological egoism, the purest expression walking of a human incapable of not doing things to his advantage. Were Thomas Hobbes ever to need an end-game conclusion to his notions that all people are selfish actors without benefit-less altruism, he needs to look no further than Donald Trump, and it seems, unfortunately, at his family. All seem infected with that stain of character of not having it.
The evidence of Trump being a bad actor in every avenue he walks down are legion, have filled books, and will fill many more as his ignominious life and presidency fade into late-night comedy jokes and historical analysis of stress testing the American Ideal. I have always been more curious, concerned, but mostly astounded at Trump’s America.
Sixty-three million people thought, for various reasons, Trump was a solid plan.
Many were never Hillary. Those I can understand, though their love of country over party and frankly their judgment I call in to question.
Many were a breed of Republican who always look for the deregulations and tax cuts. Within this group, one will find the voters who believe a businessman, using free-market savvy, will tame the bloat of government. Nothing else politically sways this sort no more than social justice democrats can be swayed by anything other than complete acceptance of all modes of life protected fairly under the laws of the land. Social issues matter no more to a tax cut republican than does tax cuts matter to a social justice democrat. Ultimately, I hold fealty to the democrats as at least on paper they align more with my values than republicans. The rights of people to live free and be the person they want with whomever they want strike me as a more noble and eternal need for a nation to address than a reduction in the marginal tax rate.
And then, the Deplorables. Hillary Clinton has never been more right about anything in her long career than when she said Trump would call forth from their caves a basketful of deplorables. The evidence has borne this out repeatedly. For three and a half years, I have asked myself, “who thought this was a good idea?”
The Deplorables. The group is a big tent. The ones who think the monolith known as “The Left” that multi-headed hydra that represents most of the country if voting and polling are believed, are fostering hate speech and taking away freedom of speech. I have many quibbles with various groups that would fall in the column called The Left, none have created a mass movement to restrict the free expression of ideas. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, will tell anyone who listens that the Left is destroying the foundational concepts of America and the West and any other phrases that remind his audience of the good old days. His initial mission was to list academics at US universities he believed were indoctrinating students with liberal values and stifling conservative speech. So far, I assume the list has every US academic on it besides Larry Schweikart. Without a doubt, professors and academics have views, strong ones, and may use their positions in unfortunate ways. That is disrespectful of the position they hold and the trust they need to maintain, and their university should deal with it. I am not sure how American values it is to make lists of people you disagree with intellectually. It seems to recall other nations with a fondness for creating lists of intellectuals.
The Whites. Nationalists, supremacists, the aggrieved, the lost, the economically distressed. Some of these groups I have so much empathy for. The tides of progress and culture are leaving their way of life behind. Those among these groups who are angry because good jobs and their way of life has gone to other countries or people should have that anger, but they have directed their vitriol at the wrong people. Jose and his Abuela did not move the factory. The board of directors and the CEO did. Bill Clinton signing NAFTA and your labor rights away did. A hundred other more valid reasons did. Technology came in and made your skills redundant. And when that happened, as it always will, the nation we call home abides by bootstrapping, so go to hell and stop whining about it. Where there should have been training and relocation, poverty, rage, and drugs came. With it came an orange-faced huckster to tell you the Mexicans and the Chinese did it.
It was people like Donald Trump, like Wilbur Ross, like Steve Mnuchin, like Betsy DeVos that took away the livelihood of the aggrieved white working class. Because it made them more money and the stockholders happy. Other nations were delighted to benefit from that misfortune and the bottomless greed of the power class that rules the US economy. But its more comfortable to blame something far away and perhaps yourself than to admit you got played by a group of carnival barkers.
The nationalists and supremacists are a breed apart. Donald Trump may or may not be a racist, for that he would have to think of others more so than himself, but those that are racist and xenophobic have found a warm place in his embrace. Those that hate and despise all things not specifically like themselves have found the oxygen they need to breathe in the body politic of the US with Trump’s largesse. If your political needs require that you say after a rally of neo-Nazis in which an anti-neo-Nazi protestor was killed, “there are good people on both sides,” then your political needs require intense examination. And part of your core group of supporters honestly believes millions of Americans who do not share their particular genetic volume of melanin are inferior to them. The more cornered he gets, the more Trump appeals to this group loudly.
There is the group that amuses me the most and concerns me the greatest. Economic and cultural rage are eternal. America will always suffer from a racial divide. It is a heavy weight on the heart of this republic, but it is a sin of this country. A group likes that Trump tells it like it is — never minding that he says so many lies and misdirects fact-checkers struggle to keep up with his pace. This group can never admit to Trump doing anything wrong. Ever. I do not mean high-level corruption. Mean when covfefe happened, it was not a mistake, it was “humor that the libs don’t get.” It was trolling. Typos happen. Gaffes happen. Every president makes mistakes. If Biden becomes president, we must brace for hundreds of them. But Trump never makes a mistake.
This group rejoiced when Trump made a debasing, tasteless joke about a reporter with a disability. I know it is wrong to do this because I used to say the word retarded constantly to describe other things and people and make similar motions about the overall idiocy of others. Life experience taught me not to do those things. How did this escape so many people? Is it taking away free speech to not say retard, faggot, homo, spic, nigger, and so on? I do not consider it a big ask to be considerate. I suppose that is not telling it like it is.
They loved that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue. And he is right. A real man like Trump, with real authority, can do things like that. Let us not worry about due process. Americans love to shoot people. We do it more than almost any other country on Earth.
I am a Reddit obsessive. One subreddit I follow is called AskTrumpSupporters. It is an exciting read. It never fails to spiral out of control. Trump does something absurd, corrupt, contemptible, stupefying, or just plain dumb-“these doctors can’t believe how much I know about medicine”-and it is always Trump is just being flip, cracking a joke, telling it like it is. After decades of the presidency being a stuffy, lofty office, the many respondents seem glad a person can say silly or outrageous things during a mass global pandemic. It feels very appropriate. The same goes for shootings, the misdeeds of his cabinet, family, associates, or anyone else in his sphere.
It also devolves into the worst of all arguments: whataboutism. Every defender of a cause or person has a deep and abiding love for this argument. Trump did this bad thing, what do you think? Obama also did it! Ok great, it was also wrong when Obama did it, but Trump is the president, so do you support his doing this bad thing? Hillary would have been worse.
Writing about the misdeeds of this man and his cronies have and will again take up volumes well beyond the space and time I have here. Even as I write, thousands of more examples that are no doubt more substantive than the ones I used come to mind. I did not touch on Trump’s adoration for dictators, his desire to lock up journalists, his wanton disregard for actual clauses of the actual constitution, not the one people make up when they feel their rights have been violated. The recent explosion of protests in the wake of the barbaric murder of George Floyd and others, the sniping about monuments to long-dead men who sought to uphold bondage of millions of people, and the disgusting image of his walk through Lafayette Park. It must have felt so powerful to have protestors cleared away so he could do that. Power is his mana. It is all he craves and all he loves.
Ultimately, the question always comes back to, how did we get this? Nations will have bad leaders. But what to make of the people who put him there? It is a question that keeps me awake at night. The troubling thing is, knowing some Trump voters, often on a personal level, they despise in others the things they support in him. Or stomaching once voting for a politician outside of your party is so gross a concept it cannot be contemplated.
Trump has left me disheartened and deeply concerned. Untangling his mess will take years.
Trump’s supporters have left me concerned. It is suddenly easy to see how people were just “doing their duty.” It is suddenly easy to see good people ok with the inhuman detention of families. Are they not people? If they are not Americans, does that mean they do not deserve the treatment accorded to a sentient being? After seeing armed men in body armor line up in statehouses and on the edges of protests, I know Trump would never have to shoot someone on 5th Avenue. His supporters would do it for him.