“As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer, and spectator, is at stake.”  — Hannah Arendt.

Today I watched some excellent and moral people in a high school anguish over some profoundly important decisions that a troubled and broken man forced upon them in the most immoral of ways.

It hurt my heart. It was so wrong.

Perhaps the real legacy of the 2020 presidential election is that somewhere between the death of George Floyd, the cries of the lonely dying in the pandemic wards unheard,   the willingness to threaten the welfare of school children, all of these things became a moral matter, one after the other,  not just a political matter.

As a former political writer, I always saw politics as a pragmatic thing, not a moral thing. There were boundaries everyone respected, things that were not done, even to win.

That changed.

In her new book, Mary Trump explains how her damaged uncle Donald became a purely transactional person, incapable of making moral judgments, or of showing any kind of empathy or concern for others. Everything – everything – is about him.

Trump has taught me several things I didn’t know. One of them was that if you worship yourself long enough and loud enough, other people will mirror you and worship you too.

After all, aren’t we all looking for God?

I guess I will never see Trump in the same way again after the last few weeks and after reading Mary Trump’s book.

The image of George Floyd being tortured in that shocking and inhuman way became a cry of grief and rage from a people sick with sorrow and timeless loss and exhausted from indifference.

They deserved some understanding, even if it was faked.

There are not two or three ways to look at that video. What happened to Floyd was just wrong.

Trump said little about the killing and clearly, felt nothing. Like the pandemic, the subject has been banished from public White House speech. It won’t help the economy.

Floyd was just another opportunity to feed some more raw meat to his followers. They devoured it hungrily.

If you know anyone who died of the coronavirus, you know that it is most often a hard and unforgiving death.

Like Floyd, people most people struck with this disease often die because they can’t breathe, and they most often die alone because no outsiders, not even family members, are permitted to be with them.

Because cameras were never allowed on the coronavirus wards, most Americans don’t know how ugly or painful – or lonely – those deaths were and are. It is relatively easy to write them off as just another kind of flu passing through.

One way or another, the sly pandemic will reveal itself to us.

I wince when I think of those poor people, ventilators shoved down their throats, alone and unable to speak, their organs shutting down, their families’ hearts torn open.

If I were the leader of the country and was responsible for caring for them and saving them,  and seeing those casualties mount, and the supplies run out, I don’ t think I could bear it.

I think I would resign, as Mary Trump says she would tell her uncle to do if she ever ran into him again. Many Japanese leaders and CEO’s committed suicide for a lot less. Something went terribly wrong in the richest country on earth.

But Trump said it himself: he is not responsible for anything.

It is profoundly immoral to let these people die for no reason or to ignore their deaths because it is politically convenient as President Trump is doing,  or turning away from the horror of their deaths.

People who do things like that can’t survive without enablers, people who ofter than unconditional support, the way some dogs are said to love some people.

If you follow politics, you might know that even in our bitterly partisan society, it has always been considered the ultimate moral failing – the line never crossed –  to knowingly endanger innocent children or to exploit them for political gain at any risk to their lives.

To me, Trumpism began as a somewhat moral movement from abandoned people left behind and crying out for justice. But it turns out the new book was right. The President is incapable of making moral decisions, he considers them signs of failure and weakness.

His father taught him that.

I believe Trump’s most significant failures will be seen as moral ones, not political ones.

He took the death of Floyd and used it as a political tool to divide the country and deny African-Americans their long-overdue reckoning from slavery and brutality, both spanning centuries and soiling the American story.

He took the death of more than 135,000 people and exploited and denied it to use as a weapon to advance his political prospects and arouse weak-minded and ignorant people too selfish or blind to save themselves or others.

Watching the news, I see that I overestimated Donald Trump, although I could see the disastrous results of some of his policies.

His actions misled me because  I believed he was elected to right some of the wrongs done to the people who elected him and loved him so completely.

But I see now that there existed no such grand scheme, only a firm, even fanatic, resolve to do away with any law, constitutional or not, that stood in the way of his greed and vindictiveness rather than any noble purpose or coherent policy.

It wasn’t real love; it was movie star love, groupie love.

Now, as we recoil from the daily outrage, it is almost as if a bunch of con men, less gifted than the Mob, had succeeded in acquiring and appropriating the government of the greatest democracy on earth.

The pardoning of Roger Stone to protect his own ass stunk from far away, as moral failures do.

There is also the uncomfortable problem that there seems no end to the number of men and women who were not cronies, or part of any inner circle but who nevertheless stick with him, even though they knew of the horror stories in the White House that far surpassed mere manipulation.

It is evident that he is incapable of trusting anyone, but how could he not be not trusted?

In the reckoning to follow, these men and women will be challenged, again and again, to explain how they rationalized supporting these things, these moral failures.

History tells us they will be held accountable. In her book, Mary Trump explains that Trump was forever trying to impress his cruel father that he was a “killer,” ruthless, willing to lie and cheat, to do anything to get his way.

This, she wrote, was the price one paid for riding on the Trumpian Star.

If you work for him, she wrote, “then he makes his vulnerabilities and insecurities your responsibility; you must assuage them, you must take care of him. Failing to do so leaves a vacuum that is unbearable for him to withstand for long. If you’re someone who cares about his approval, you’ll say anything to retain it. He has suffered mightily, and if you aren’t doing all you can do to alleviate that suffering, you should suffer, too.”

So in a sense, I think it works this way. We are all his father Fred, he is forever trying to show us what a “killer,” he is, how tough, how unwavering, how uncompromising.

If you follow the news, you can sometimes get the sense he has turned our country into one giant toilet bowl, a place to dump all of the ugly shit in his life every single day.

People who get too close to this sun are blinded, they fall right out of the sky, or are pushed.

No mercy, no pity, no empathy, no love. Ever. It’s a hard place for us to be, but perhaps a harder place for him to be.

Sitting in the principal’s office at Bishop Maginn High School today, I was in awe watching Mike Toland and Sue Silverstein struggle over impossible and unprecedented decisions that could affect the lives and families of the students they love.

I thought this is not excusable, this is not forgivable.

It made me angry.

“The stress is always there,” said Sue, who is always filled with the joy of teaching, not the stress of playing God. “It never goes away, and thousands of schools all over the country are going through it.” Sue is losing her joy.

This did not have to happen.

This was someone else’s responsibility to study these facts, to talk to the people who know best, to explain how a school can open right now while so many people are dying, to offer guidelines while parents tremble and kids are put at risk.

I think we all know what to do now.

Get back into our homes and shelters for a few weeks and beat down this awful thing once and for all, or as close to all as we can get. It’s not a good way; the doctors say it’s the only way. Do we need to undermine the doctors too?

Does it need to be said that no parent, teacher, or child should be asked to risk getting sick or killing someone else because their leader had a nasty father?

Or that no principal or teacher should have to choose between endangering a teacher or a student because it’s inconvenient not to do so?

Ladies and gentle, while we hope to slowly emerge from the rubble of the events of the last four years, it might be wise not to forget what is hopefully these years of aberration so that we do not become unworthy of the hopeful beginnings of several hundred years ago.

Facts are like chickens; they always come home to roost, let us welcome them and make them feel at home again.

For all of our troubles and shortcomings, we like to think of ourselves as a moral people, and so many of us are. Trump’s biggest mistake was in forgetting that there are incorruptible people in the country, too many to manipulate or shove aside.

The founders of our Republic had significant flaws.

But still, as the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in  her book Responsibility and Judgment, “it was the greatness of this Republic to give due to account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst.”