U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the swearing in for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in the Oval Office, on Tuesday.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Those who aspire to lead democratic nations are tested from the moment they declare their candidacy. Does he speak well? Is she good on her feet? How will he handle the economy? Will she be trusted in a crisis?
Each candidate is sliced and smeared and pressed onto a slide, so that the electorate can inspect every personal and professional detail. But there’s one question voters are almost never asked to consider: Is this person fundamentally good?
That is: If you strip away the politics, the partisan fealty, and the pandering for support, will you find a genuinely decent person? The type who winces when someone else bleeds, and who shares in their joy when they succeed? The kind of person who, on his or her deathbed, might express regret about certain actions, but never his or her intentions? Is this a person of integrity – a person who is, at the core, good?
Last weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump was informed of the death of Robert Mueller, who served as special counsel on Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Mueller devoted much of his adult life to his country; he served in the Marines, as a public prosecutor, as assistant attorney general, and as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was also a husband, father, and grandfather.
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“Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Mr. Trump posted on social media. “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
I accept that even decent people might experience a brief wave of pleasure when they learn they have outlived their enemies. But most are kind enough to keep that transient feeling to themselves, empathetic enough to recognize that others are hurting, and reflective enough to understand that personal acrimony doesn’t devalue the worth of a human life.
Mr. Trump’s comment in the wake of Mr. Mueller’s death wasn’t really remarkable for him; following the killing of actor-director Rob Reiner, Mr. Trump went on social media to suggest Mr. Reiner’s death was “due to the anger he caused others” because of his “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” When former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell died in 2021, Mr. Trump eulogized him as a “classic RINO” (Republican In Name Only). This is a pattern for Mr. Trump.
But what was, and what remains, remarkable about this and other examples of Mr. Trump’s unapologetic callousness is the American public’s tolerance of it . His latest social-media post was shrugged off as a blip in the timeline – just another example of Trump being Trump – when it really was a deeply antisocial, deeply poisonous message about how Americans may view each other’s worth.
For generations, writers and scholars have theorized about the forces that corrode democratic society. In the book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt posited that two basic norms have preserved American democracy in the 20th century: mutual tolerance and forbearance, which the authors define as “the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.” They argue that these forces were already beginning to weaken before the 2016 election, but that Mr. Trump has set the process in overdrive.
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In The Decent Society, which was published 30 years before Mr. Trump became President, philosophy professor Avishai Margalit wrote that civilized societies are ones in which the state does not humiliate its citizens, and where citizens do not humiliate each other. In other words, they are not ones where, to cite some contemporary examples, a would-be President mocks a New York Times reporter with a disability, or where he labels his critics with degrading, embarrassing nicknames. Yet it is now normal in America to see ICE agents pull people out of their homes in their underwear in front of their neighbours and children (occasionally, in error), and where even the dead are mocked and ridiculed by the most powerful man in the country. (Senator John McCain was “last in his class,” Mr. Trump posted on X months after his death.)
There is no force that will singularly cripple the lattice of a democratic nation, but surely the death of decency is one of the most corrosive elements. Because when the man in charge is not one of high moral integrity – when he cannot empathize with, for example, the tenants he forced out by depriving them of heat and hot water so that he could build luxury condos in the 1980s – he will not seek to preserve basic norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance. He will humiliate his own people, and rejoice when his citizens start doing it to each other and to other leaders.
If the leader is not a good person, the country will not be a good place, either. Mr. Trump’s own personal moral failings are poisoning his country.