“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to the point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him and loses all respect for himself and others. And have no respect, he ceases to love.”   – Fyodor Dostoevsky.

And when you cease to love, you become what the psychiatrists call a sociopath – you lose the ability to feel the pain and hurt and need of others and become something less than a full human being.

Trump is also what the shrinks call a pathological liar. He does not seem to know the difference between a truth and a lie, and he has trained his many followers not to care.

They love him for his “policies,” not his integrity or compassion. Thus they become complicit in lies. Benjamin Disraeli, the great British prime minister, always said three types of  lies — “lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

As much as anything else in this insanely disruptive year, I’m struck by the evolution of the lie from something we didn’t accept to something we applaud and mimic.

For much of my life, a lie was a dreadful, disqualifying thing.

You would get kicked out of school for a lie. Punished by parents for lying. Ostracized by friends for lying.  Thrown off a baseball team for lying. Lying disqualified a politician from public office. Priests and rabbis would scold you for lying and preach about it. I lied to myself often when I was younger. But I never believed me.

I don’t remember knowing anyone who thought lying was okay for any reason.

What happened to the lie between then and now? How did it become okay? In a sense, I think that is the struggle the country is having with Trump and his era.

Did Trump make the lie acceptable all by himself? Wasn’t there some process in the middle?

I missed the lesson where it was explained that lies were okay if you did what people wanted you to do. Lies were not disqualifying any longer; they were admirable.

I strongly believe that if Donald Trump could tell the truth, he would have been re-elected easily, even once in a while. He caught the right wave. But I don’t care what anybody says; I don’t think people really ever trust a liar; we are naturally drawn to community and co-operation; chronic lying is uncomfortable for both of us and rarely natural.

Trump loves all three categories of lies and lies about them daily; in fact, he lies almost every time he opens his mouth. That is what makes him pathological.

Pathological liars tell compulsive lies without a clear motive. This type of lying is different than non-pathological lying, where the lie is often beneficial in some way. Lying is a common feature of social interactions among humans.

This behavior even occurs in some animals, such as monkeys. With Trump, lying is his language, his currency. There is no shame in it for him if it advances his cause.

A person without remorse has a could hole for a soul.

I didn’t learn a whole lot when I was young, and I lied quite a lot. I was a compulsive liar; I lied to get things that I wanted or avoid things I didn’t want. I always had a motive, and as I grew older, I was taught to be ashamed of lying, that it was a form of evil.

And I did become ashamed of it.

I gave up lying to myself or anybody else because I realized it would disqualify me as a whole human being; it would keep me from being the person I wished to be, from finding love or writing with feeling. I couldn’t imagine lying would get me to the Presidency.

Lying is corrosive to me, almost unforgivable.

If I lied the way Trump lies, I would be ignored and reviled, or perhaps I would be rich and powerful. I’m really not sure any longer, and that is a sad thing.

In a sense, Trump is a genius about lying. He revolutionized the lie, elevated to an almost unimaginable level. Did I miss the memo?

Trump understood what all the great dictators understood – Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao –  if you lie often enough and loudly enough, many people will believe you, especially if you are in a power position.

Trump came into office lying, and he has perfected the technique thanks to the presidential election. Every time he tweets or speaks, he says he won, and every time he says he won – he doesn’t do evidence or facts – more and more people believe him.

From now on, when people lose, it had to be because they were cheated. Trump is a carrier of grievance and mistrust. And the father of the modern lie.

The psychiatrists were stunned by Trump initially and forbidden by their associations to diagnose him in public. That was considered unethical. It also helped to blind us.

That taboo has been broken, and we are learning more about what makes Trump tick and how he has damaged our country.

Much of that new research centers around people who lie – sociopaths, hedonists, narcissists.  All of those labels have been applied to our President.

Trump is a deeply troubled man. Instead of getting treatment for his sickness, he gets to be the free world leader, an unsettling position for anyone who is mentally ill. He gets to play out his worse instincts and most corrowive wounds.

In the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Drs. Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword write that it was soon glaringly apparent to mental health professionals that Trump embodied a specific personality type: an unbridled, or extreme, present hedonist.

As the words suggest, a present hedonist – a person who believes that the pursuit of pleasure is the most important thing in life, think golf –  lives in the moment, without much thought of any consequences of their actions.

An extreme present hedonist will say whatever it takes to pump up his ego and soothe his inherent low self-esteem.

Trump lies not because he thinks he is great, but because he knows that he isn’t. When he suffers a stinging loss or defeat, he lies more and more to persuade himself that he is worthy. He can’t bear losing.

And he has constructed an alternative reality to support his delusion. When millions of people believe your lie, the world turns upside down.

In April of 2017, Anna Grzymala-Busse wrote a piece in the Washington Post about the pundits mourning the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, describing the fire as symbolic of a “Judeo-Christian” annihilation.

I remember the piece; it stuck in my mind because as a political reporter, I was writing around the time the Judeo-Christian ethos – the ethical system of Christianity and Judaism that dominated the Western World for generations –  was collapsing.

(The phrase ‘Judeo-Christian” ethic entered the popular lexicon as the standard liberal term for the idea that Western moral values rest on a religious consensus that included both Christians and Jews.)

Grzymala-Basse wrote that the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which once united Americans, now had begun to divide them.

Many people use the term “Judeo-Christian tradition” to describe a religious and ethical consensus on moral behavior. The phrase commonly refers to the shared religious texts (the Ten Commandments, incorporation of the Torah into the Christian Bible), shared moral principles (the “golden rule”), and millennia of shared cultural and historical values between Christianity and Judaism.

Both faiths affirm one God, prize the covenant between God and his people, and value the dignity of human life. They both preach the need to support the needy and the vulnerable.  They both were advanced by and for white people.

Said to be the basis of Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian tradition invokes shared values and connected fates.

The Judeo-Christian identity has always been a core tenet of American national identity, writes, Grzymala-Basse –  especially white American national identity. Dwight Eisenhower openly called for a government that is “founded in deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us, of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.”

This ethos, shared by politicians from both parties, loosely followed the Old and New Testaments, which were taught in schools and temples and churches, and celebrated during World War II as part of the rationale for combatting the Nazi’s, who were portrayed as anti-Christs,  the very opposite of the followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Lying was a sin, so was faithlessness in marriage; divorce was immoral, so was cruelty and neglect for the poor. Donald Trump rejected every major tenet of this tradition, and it is increasingly apparent that this helped him rise to power.

The American embrace of these moral values gave religious groups new moral authority. When evangelical Protestants entered national politics in the late 1970s, they allied with the Republican Party. Each saw the political advantages of working together.

The “Judeo-Christian tradition” justified both their political influence — and the policy demands of the Republican Party on abortion, stem cell research, religion in schools, judiciary appointments, and even foreign policy.

The implied consensus was frail, it turned into more of a partisan tool.

The intrusion of religion into bi-partisan politics began the split to tear the country in half and elect Donald Trump as President. He could never have made it without the Evangelicals.

Trump sensed the growing power of this movement and pledged to give them every single thing they wanted, which he has faithfully tried to do, even though he has never shown any faith at all in his own life, has lied, stolen, and philandered for much of his life.

In fact, if you study the Ten Commandments and throw in his handling of the pandemic, he has violated every one of them and drawn enormous support from so-called religious people.

With the rise of TV, the Internet, social media and the decline of Church attendance,  divorce, and the disintegration of community and family structures, there no longer was any single cohesive moral way of looking at the world.

Everyone drifted to their own tribe online and talked only to themselves,  inflaming and dividing and arousing one another. Online, there are many thousands of different modalities, including threatening to kill anybody who disagrees with you and stealing their private identity data.

Trump’s followers believe theirs is a moral mission, just like the opposition. We can all get support somewhere for anything we believe.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has splintered.

Priests and rabbis no longer tell people that they must be moral because nobody is listening, religious attendance dropped since the early 1960’sand the Evangelical Movement became a Christian Nationalist white political movement, one of the first Christian sub-cultures to say it is okay to lie, steal, cheat and plunder in exchange for pushing a political agenda.

This movement has done more to undercut Christ’s once-vaunted morality and his faith than almost any other event in modern politics. The Judeo-Christian ethic, as overblown as it was, was suddenly no longer about being righteous. It was about domination and winning, at all costs, by any means.

Why wouldn’t it be okay to lie if one of the most powerful elements in Christianity said it was fine to lie if you opposed abortion, insisted on religious teaching schools, lobbed for judicial appointment, and even promoted a foreign policy?

In a sense, it was inevitable that a hedonist and narcissist like Trump would fill the void caused by the loss of religious moral authority; it was always religion that dictated acceptable and moral behavior in America.

There was really nothing to hold him back.

Trump promoted his own new moral authority: power by any means at all costs. The lie became the new God.

I have an ethical problem with the people who love Trump because there is no way I can see to support him without embracing what I consider unethical and immoral behavior.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t get around it.

I never thought I’d miss the pious rabbis and priests who lectured the Western World on what it meant to be moral and who gave me a headache.

They scared the hell out of people, but they carried a lot of weight.

Today we seem out of balance, without a center, a moral compass; I can’t find the strong moral underpinnings that make for community or national purpose.

I think we are missing those Judeo-Christians as a culture and as a moral compass. Our leaders have become greedy, feral, and without any common sense of right and wrong.

I’ve noticed with interest that the Democrats, as the Republicans before them, are beginning to embrace religion in their political campaigns.

And I recently joined the Poor People’s Campaign, a faith-based movement on behalf of working people and the poor founded by the Rev. Dr.  Barber.

One of the candidates campaigning for the U.S. Senate from Georgia, the Reve. Raphael Warnock is pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King’s church in Atlanta, Georgia.

He very much draws from the faith-based political campaigns of Martin Luther King and John Lewis.

“This is what America is all about,” the Rev. Warnock tells supporters, “we can lift all of us out of this darkness into new daybreak of freedom and prosperity for this great country.  We can do it – but the only way to do it is together.”

Perhaps the moral people are rising again, after years of being shunted aside.

While the Judeo-Christian ethic reined, the idea of someone like Donald Trump, who has made immorality and the denigration of the poor and the vulnerable, the centerpiece of his presidency, would have been inconceivable.

The religious icons would have torn a philander and accused sex abuser to pieces.

Who, precisely, is teaching morality to children now? Who is filtering out the disturbed and the morally corrupt?

In 2011, I lived in New Jersey, I could see the smoke from the Towers high up in the sky, as army jets circled overhead and National Guard trucks took up positions on major highways, and children stood at bus stops with their mothers for hours waiting for their fathers to come home.

So many never did.

In 2015, during a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Donald Trump told his wildly cheering followers that “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down…And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as the building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”

The next day, police and many newspapers and cable channels reported that Jersey City police said that never happened. Trump insisted otherwise: “it was on television. I saw it happen.”

It was never on television. It never happened. He never stopped claiming he saw it with his own eyes.

This was a monstrous lie, a heresy given the almost sacred space 911 takes up in American lore and trauma.

I think of this as the day it became okay to lie. I remember shaking my head in wonder.

I can’t imagine any politician in American history who would have survived telling a lie like that. To exploit that tragedy was a monstrous slap at everyone who died and everyone who mourned.

At the time, I couldn’t help thinking that if Christianity were alive and well, the Church alone would have stopped such a person dead.

I never quite imagined that the church alone helped elected him and supports him still.

I can’t help but think we were all asleep, all complicit. We wanted so badly to believe it was all right, that there would be good reasons for it, that we just shivered and looked away while lying became normal and routine. It was just Donald.

Certainly, no one should be the least bit surprised by Trump’s unhinged campaign to insist he won the November election. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he tweeted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

In her Washington Post piece, Anna Grzymala-Buss, a Professor of International Studies at Stanford University, wrote that the “Judeo-Christian” Tradition has become an expedient political tactic and is no longer a long-standing historical consensus.

Like many people, I await a new kind of Messiah, someone who can teach us and inspire us and remind us that truth is important, and a lie is a son, and we really do have to care about other people to call ourselves human beings.

For me, lies and secrets are like cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only hatred and destruction behind.