Recently, President Trump declared that, when it comes to international affairs, he will be guided exclusively by his own "morality." Trump's use of the word was simultaneously nonsensical, ironic, humorous, and alarming, coming from someone who is arguably the most amoral person ever to rise to the presidency. Essentially what the President was saying was that rules and laws don't apply to him. And while in this case he might have been asserting his "morality" within an international context, his transgressive moral inclinations have been a lifelong lodestar, guiding him through all aspects of his governance and his life.
Trump's personal moral compass has directed him to cheat on all of his three wives, steal from his own charity, lie as a matter of standard practice, invent a fraudulent university, renege on contracts, claim innocents to be criminal, and pardon the guilty. His morality has bequeathed him with an astonishingly callous mean streak, exemplified in his treatment of the late Rob Reiner and John McCain. In sum, he believes, as an amoralist, that he can do and say whatever he wants under his own authority, without consequence.
Of course, many of his admirers like this about him – his willingness to break norms, to stand up against established protocols, to speak his mind without the restraint of a political choke leash. In doing so, they misinterpret an absence of moral decency as a strength: they see Trump as a heroic iconoclast, bashing the crumbling edifice of elitist convention. Wrong. Trump is in fact a reckless and capricious amoralist, not an effectual nonconformist. His is a world circumscribed not by law or religious mores or the checks and balances conceived by the Founders but by the self-invented and self-serving "morality" of an unscrupulous maverick.
The concept of morality, of course, is forever in flux; the right of one era or culture can be the wrong of another era or culture, and vice versa. Regardless, morality is like a societal glue – a shared belief system that binds together a society or culture as a functional unit. It establishes the parameters of right and wrong in law, in religion, and in general social intercourse. Someone insisting that morality can be individualistically determined – someone who allows personal interests and calculations to eclipse legal, religious, or social covenants – is, simply, amoral.
The amoralist's "moral" choices are always ad hoc, applied extemporaneously as the situation or circumstances demand. Thus are the results often contradictory. While the President can pardon more than 1,000 violent January 6 insurrectionists, he can vilify mostly peaceful (if perhaps profanely loud and obnoxious) protesters in places like Minneapolis. He can blow to smithereens nameless, low-level drug runners – whose guilt (or innocence) has never been proven – while pardoning convicted drug kingpins like Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduras president, and Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a double life sentence for running the largest illegal drug operation on the internet. He has boasted about being "the most militaristic person ever" while quixotically, and even comically, fancying himself as a man of peace.
Being guided by the principle that "whatever I do or say is always right" – a foundational tenet of the amoralist – assures that wrongs, by accepted moral standards, will be committed. When Trump's poisonous sideman, Stephen Miller (a strong challenger to Trump when it comes to moral vacuity), declared that ICE agents were protected by "immunity" he was essentially giving the agents a moral exemption.
Miller's pronouncement, of course, was in response to, and in defense of, the killing of Renee Good and the goon-squad tactics of ICE agents in places like Minneapolis. The ICE boys have been emboldened to act accordingly – beating captives, maiming protestors with non-lethal weaponry, arresting innocents, shooting people, even killing people. Jurisdictional violations (read the Constitution's 10th amendment), prudently effective policing practices, or common decency – all disregarded, overridden by the ultimate amoralist switcheroo: wrong is transformed into right, sometimes fatally. To the steadfast moralist, this is the point where the threshold from amorality into evil is crossed.
In international affairs, the stated rationale for Trump's imperialistic urges – take over Venezuela, take over Greenland, threaten Canada, Mexico, and Panama – has been mercurial. National security, drug-trade intervention, mineral rights, and economic stability have all been invoked. But in this muddle of motives, a latent reason prevails: a self-aggrandizing lust for global power. Rather than operating within the boundaries of international comity, shared values, hard-won treaties, and the rule of law, Trump fantasizes about all global vectors pointing toward himself as the bearer of the international scepter and orb, the world's most powerful dude. Power for power's sake is the amoral leader's secret sauce.
Trump's amorality has percolated to all strata of a once-honorable Republican party. A long list of Republicans, once with moral backbones, have abandoned party principles and capitulated (sold their souls) to Trumpian amorality. It starts at the top of the presidential line of succession: Vice President J.D. Vance (who once compared Trump to Hitler), House Speaker Mike Johnson (who in 2015 said Trump "lacks . . . the moral center we desperately need again in the White House"), Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who once called Trump a "con artist"). The party has become a breeding ground for moral dry rot.
Morality is collective concept; there is really no such thing as individual morality. As Trump insists otherwise, the nation and the world tilt toward chaos and distrust. A return to order will be possible only when a connection with some moral bedrock can be re-established.
Oliver lives in Warren.
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