At His Core, Trump Is an Immoralist
Will we let this man and
his felons drag us to moral chaos?
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
·
Oct. 1, 2020
So far, the 21st century has been a
century of menace and insecurity. The threats have come in rapid succession:
terrorism, financial collapse, plague, climate change, the quaking of our
democracy. For good reasons, a tone of heightened alarm has become the default
setting across the media.
People on the right and the left see
threats coming from different places. In his new book, “The Securitarian Personality,”
the political scientist John R. Hibbing argues that people on the right tend to
react to threats coming from outside America, while people on the left see
threats coming from the powerful financial and political spheres inside
America.
Hibbing’s book, based on reporting,
focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most
enthusiastic Trump supporters. The most ardent ones, he notes, are not
economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or
conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core
America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John
Wayne, football and hunting.
They feel that core
America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders:
immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color.
They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred
homeland from alien menace.
People who feel themselves under threat
have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend
the homeland might be a good thing. But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is
that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost
an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal
and cheating long before he put on political garb.
In this presidential campaign, Trump’s
nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while
his immoral nature has taken center stage. Compared to 2016, it’s more pure
Trump and less Pat Buchanan.
The key events of the campaign have
been moral events: Trump reportedly calling
military veterans and the war dead suckers and losers; Trump downplaying a
deadly pandemic to the American people; Trump failing to pay fair taxes; Trump
sidling up to white supremacists, resorting to racist and QAnon dog whistles.
The debate was an important moment. You
and I can give sermons about how cruel, dishonest behavior shreds the norms of
a decent society. But moral degradation is an invisible process. It happens
subtly over time.
During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in
real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the
presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human
conversation impossible. Debate watchers were confronted with a core truth:
What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a
second term.
On Tuesday we got see that immorality
isn’t just a vague thing people talk about in Sunday school. It is a Howitzer
that blows through walls and leaves rubble. It is an attempt to serve yourself
by breaking things and making other people suffer.
Biden should continue to talk about his
economic recovery and pandemic control plans and all that stuff, but this
election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral
core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let
Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?
As a temperament and philosophy,
conservatism has one central premise: Humans are fallen beings, and the crust
of civilization is thin. We are able to live sweetly because over centuries we
have constructed a moral and social order, which is fragile and requires constant
tending.
With his conduct, Trump assaults this
core conservative instinct. He is separating the nationalists from some
temperamental conservatives. The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his
savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel
in their bones that some new danger is afoot.
You can see this separation in the
polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016 battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16
percent of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28 percent now
support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.
In 2016, Trump won noncollege-educated
white women in Wisconsin by 16 percentage points.
Now he is losing them by 9 points. In 2016
Trump tied Clinton
among college educated whites in Pennsylvania. Now they are going for Biden, 61
percent to 38 percent. In 2016 in Ohio, Trump carried union households by
13 points. Now he is losing them by 8 points.
Some Republicans see
Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But
his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability
of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let
him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.
My intuition tells me, as does the polling data, that more
people are paying attention, have recognized what’s before them and will make
the right decision. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward made
the essential point: “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to
save it; sometimes none to spare.”