The moral authority of President Trump – as uncomfortable as it makes many people – has carried him to the Presidency and even enabled him to expand his power far beyond anyone’s expectations.

This President has stunned the political and media establishment, and moral authority has never seemed more important, or of more interest.

While many people in the country see his election as our greatest moral mistake, an almost equal amount see it as our finest hour.

Arrogance is the foundation of immorality. And arrogance is the hallmark of the movements we call the left and the right. Nobody understands or wants to understand anybody else.

The coronavirus Pandemic and the killing of George Floyd has undermined the moral authority of President Trump more than any other events of the last four years.

His struggle is painful to see and also mesmerizing. It isn’t often I get to see a human being fighting over his and the national soul every day in public.

But don’t kid yourself. Trump has as much moral authority as almost anyone in the country. It doesn’t have to be the kind most of the people reading this would like or choose.

I want to talk about the meaning of moral authority and how it applies to our election this year.

This election is all about morality the immigrants, the poor, African-Americans, Whistle-Blowers, Lindsey Graham, the Democrats.

People who want to understand what is happening have to suck it up for a couple of thousand words, take a deep breath,  swallow some bitter pills,  open themselves up to heresy, and practice Active Listening.

And Active Thinking.

When I cut through all the steam and smoke of the left and the right, I see that the 2020 Presidential election is about whether Donald Trump has the moral authority to lead.

The formal definition of moral authority is “trustworthiness to make decisions that are right and good.”

That’s what we are deciding in November that is major, and perhaps only, issue to consider.

Everyone has to make their own decisions and face their demons and angels. At some point, we will all have to look in the mirror and like what we see.

I am working hard to understand what is happening in our country.

To do that, I have to let go of the idea that I am more noble and moral than anyone else. Mostly, that has already been beaten out of me. We all think we have the answers; we prefer to talk, not listen.

But the more I see, the fewer answers I have. And since George Floyd died, my eyes and ears are wide open. The last few weeks have not been kind to smug or oblivious people.

We get to see truth for ourselves this days, we don’t have to wait for the morning paper to read about it.

There is one thing the left and the right share: that is arrogance, the first cousin of privilege.

Empathy is the ability to stand in the shoes of others, even when your feet hurt.

Not only do we presume that we all know what is moral, but we also assume that a country founded on and defined in part by slavery ever was really moral.

That very new idea is shaking a lot of people up since Floyd died on that street in Minneapolis.

Our founding fathers said liberty and the pursuit of freedom was an inalienable right. But at the same time, we kidnapped human beings, brutalized them, and enslaved them. In some ways, we are still doing the same thing.

Historians say two Presidents had genuine moral authority – George Washington  (yes, he owned slaves) and Abraham Lincoln. Both understand their limits and the limits of their power.

Both could have abused their power, neither one did, at least not often.

I’m not a historian, but I think Lincoln’s authority came from his heart and eloquence. He also had empathy, even for his enemies.  He had a good heart.

From what I’ve read about George Washington, a lot of his authority came from his height, (historians loved his thighs, said a new book about him) his love of silence, his eagerness to retire, and his gorgeous uniforms.

He never really wanted power or had too many great ideas,  and thus, he gained trust.

Moral authority happens over time; it can’t be commanded or demanded. I think Trump is perhaps learning that right now, if he is open to learning.

The devastating legacy of the left and the right is that these two ideologies have made it almost impossible for one side to listen to the other, or see moral authority in the opposition.

The people are paying the price. Congress is little more than a debating society, and not a very good one.

They just both butt heads like mating elephants; the ground trembles, but nothing can change, and no one can win.

The people who oppose President Trump believe he is immoral and corrupt. The people who support him believe he is the most moral President of the century, and perhaps of all time.

While many acknowledge his flaws and grating personality, they also believe his Presidency is not only moral but that he alone stands between true morality and chaos,  a dangerous and immoral political movement with no enduring values or restraints.

In the hundreds of young people singing and dancing and teaching in Seattle’s so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Trump and his supporters see the future if he is defeated – a lawless, formless, anarchistic takeover of law, order, and decency.

That is the society they most fear from so-called progressives and their base, the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump, almost alone in national politics, understands the moral implications for them. An ideology that tolerates or supports chaos and lets children take over police stations and the shutter businesses and defy a mayor is what is at stake for them and their children.

Trump says he will stop it, no matter what.

I want to be honest and admit that I identify with the people running the zone much more than the people condemning them, but I also understand the fears of the other side.

If you live in the country, where all of this is surreal and remote, like the Pandemic, these images are what they most fear.

Nothing could be more symbolic than their takeover of a police precinct and their refusal to allow police into the zone. However, daring and understandable, that is the very definition of anarchy.

The “progressive” view of morality is powered by the belief that an honest government depends on a different President with different values.

They believe this one will unravel crucial principles of freedom, compassion, the foundations of civil law, and decency and empathy.

They support women’s freedom to control their bodies; they support the restriction of lethal weaponry, increased immigration, and more help for the poor and the vulnerable.

They seek to restrain, refund, even eliminate the police in their communities; they support the right of gay and trans people to marry and use whatever bathrooms they choose to use.

The different views of morality could hardly be starker. These are all issues relating to moral authority.

Seeing Trump only through the narrow prism of corruption, cruelty, and abuse of power isn’t quite enough if the goal is to understand what is happening to our country and respond to it in a positive and lasting way.

This is not a new struggle; it is a very old one, the splintering of much of Christianity into a political morality movement that breaks away from Judeo-Christian values and seeks political power on its own terms.

The Evangelicals, a huge and powerful voting bloc in America,  are warriors for morality as it is defined in ancient liturgy and modern economics. And they have turned themselves into victims of persecution, here and all over the world.

From the first, President Trump has understood the moral underpinning of the “other” and mostly unacknowledged moral foundations of nearly half of the country.

If you believe that abortion is murder, as so many people do, then opposing it is perhaps the most essential moral stance imaginable. What is more important than saving human life?

If you believe that the right to purchase and bear arms freely is a moral as well as a legal right, then the Second Amendment becomes a question of morality, not weaponry.

If you believe that religious freedom is being threatened by gay and transgender rights, or by secular notions of separation of church and state, then religious liberty becomes a very moral stance.

If you believe the President understands this view of morality and will fight for it, then he has the moral authority to lead, and the followers to support him.

Trump either grasped this from afar or stumbled into this understanding on his way to the Presidency, his campaign always seemed to come together on the fly.

What Donald Trump sensed – however, he sensed it – was that the defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, is a global phenomenon.

To challenge authority and the existing order and ignore its restrictions and traditions is morality in much of the world and much of America in 2020. So-called populists movements have erupted all over the world. This happens when the government doesn’t work well for anyone but the rich.

Moral philosopher Hannah Arendt believed this challenge to authority would one day be accounted as the outstanding event of modern times.

Harvard Divinity Professor and author Harvey Cox agree:

“We now live in a ‘post-Christian’ America. The Judeo-Christian ethic no longer guides our social institutions. Christian ideals and values no longer dominate social thought and action. The Bible has ceased to be a common base of moral authority for judging whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable.”

The Judeo-Christian ethos indeed defined morality in politics and most of the country for centuries.  Judeo-Christian values formed our other Constitution. Almost everyone – especially the political and civic government –  lived by those rules. Without it, the very meaning of moral authority is up for grabs.

Once the Judeo-Christian tradition, as it is called, united Americans. Now it divides them. There is no longer a single guiding moral ethic to guide our leaders and us.

And Trump is on one side, his opposition on the other. In many ways, that is at the heart of the partisan civil war.

The politician who embraced the Judeo-Christian ethic would seek to bring together these two different and warring ideas of morality would try to please each of them at least some of the time.

We forget sometimes that leaders lead, they don’t just follow. Trump’s notion of leadership is to identify a core constituency and accede to it all of the time, in every way. He is a transactional, not a moral, leader. I will do whatever you want me to do, in every possible way, and you will, in terms give me enormous sums of money and absolute support.

This might work in normal times, but these are not normal times. The coronavirus and racial eruptions and shock are not an ideological position. They enter the lives and homes and work of people and can transcend ideologies like the left and the right.

It doesn’t matter what he says, it matters what we see, at the moment he is helpless to regain control. His rallies are his medicine and inspiration, but their belligerence and mob mentality are way out of sync with the national mood.

People are tired of chaos and conflict every single day, especially this year. They want normal, they want nice, they want some peace. Even the trolls are left/right warriors seem weary and predictable to me.

He has quarantined himself in the most confining way, even without a mask, or especially without a mask. And wait until a few of those cheering people start to get sick. And you can be assured some will get sick, in Tulsa, and then again in Jacksonville. Fla.

Those are not the stories any rational politician would want to see on the news. And they will undermine the moral authority he will need to lead and win re-election.

We can puff ourselves up with self-righteousness – we are the moral ones, after all. But that hasn’t worked out.

In many ways – old ways, I suppose – both ideas of morality seem hypocritical, even outdated in the modern world.

James Baldwin argued that the idea that we ever were a moral country is absurd, that this is the hypocritical foundation that has rotted our moral authority at home.

“The moral authority in the Western world is gone,” he wrote.”And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record–everybody’s record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you’re doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call “now,” waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.”

John Adams argued that since power corrupts, the people’s demand for moral authority and character increase as the importance of an elected position like the Presidency increases.

Both sides demand moral authority in our cultural civil war. The problem is that each side is convinced they alone deserve it, and neither has earned it, according to every poll ever taken.

History teaches that moral authority is never retained by attempts to seize it or hold onto it. It comes without being sought and is kept without a struggle.

Somebody has to actually be moral to have it. Curiously, at the moment, that person is Joe Biden. Everyone who knows him says he is a righteous man, and his popularity centers on the idea that he possesses moral authority.

If you wish to understand why people elected a nihilist to be President four years ago and pleaded with him to disrupt and demoralize the system, take a look at this video of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham just a few years ago.

In the video, Graham can be seen calling Donald Trump a liar and bigot and praising Biden as “perhaps the greatest man God ever created.” At the moment, he is investigating him as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and at the President’s insistence.

This is why so many people hate our political system and the hypocrisy that seems to be its foundation. Can they be blamed for wanting the system disrupted?

Biden’s perception as a moral man is important, it is not my judgment; I’m not part of the Democratic Party; it is the judgment found in every single poll taken. For now, it’s just the truth.

The stunning impact of the Floyd killing is to awaken all of us – many people on both sides – to the idea that we have lost our moral authority as a nation.

Congress no longer works for us, and our country no longer works for millions of poor and excluded peoples. We see that the country has refused to come to terms with slavery, even after 400 years.