Tina
Brown: How Trump Broke Our Moral Compass
Donald Trump greets the crowd at
Huntington Place Convention Center in Detroit on August 26, 2024. (Emily
Elconin via Getty Images)
There’s
been no shortage of outrages from the Trump administration. The problem for
liberals is that these outrages don’t seem to overly bother the American
public.
By Tina Brown
12.10.25 —U.S.
Politics
President Donald Trump’s greatest gift to America this year
was to liberate people to be their worst selves. It’s okay to relish
extrajudicial killings. Hey, it’s just some stranded Venezuelan drug mule
clinging to the side of a bombed-out boat. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “No more politically correct and
overbearing rules of engagement.”) Trump has made it unexceptional to see a
terrified Guatemalan housepainter (or as White House press secretary Karoline
Leavitt put it in March, one of the “heinous
monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have
no right to be in this country”) being bundled by masked agents into a car that
will speed him to a supermax in oblivion. After a possibly PTSD-addled Afghan was charged with
shooting two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., and with killing one
of them, Trump halted naturalization ceremonies for immigrants, who were poised
to become U.S. citizens after years of waiting, from “high-risk” countries. This year has been a
master class in the exercise of casual inhumanity.
Let’s go on. Trump has normalized foul misogyny toward women reporters, calling them “piggy,”
“stupid,” “incapable,” and “ugly, both inside and out.” He has blinded us to
the grift, the grossness, the “bigger, bigger, bigger” $300 million ballroom, and the vomitous
fairground gold daubed all over the moldings and fireplace in the once-sober
Oval Office, now labeled from the outside in gilt cursive script like a high
roller’s Las Vegas hotel suite. Here, he holds forth, the all-powerful
potentate in Doritos bronzer, the most aureate of mighty assholes, entertaining
a confederacy of smiling despots: Nayib Bukele, Viktor
Orbán, Mohammed bin Salman.
Jot and Tittle
The problem for liberals is that the multiplicity of Trump
outrages are not outrages that seem to overly bother the American public. In a report last week featuring six
Republican voters, four of them had no real qualms about the boat strike
policy. Cf. some dude named Brian in Orlando, Florida: “I’m not losing any
sleep over the two people clinging to the boat.” Cf. Naomi, the hard-ass from
Dallas: “If you’re caught up in something that’s very detrimental to society, I
think that you should die. . . . Sometimes we get caught up in trying to have
every jot and tittle covered from the Constitution but the reality is that we
need to be realistic.”
Read
America Doesn’t Care About Trump’s
Graft
Trump’s two first-term impeachment hearings consumed the
“jot and tittle” crowd, but sent everyone else to sleep. The danger with issues
like the Venezuelan boat strikes is that Congressional Democrats’ righteous and
necessary battles to highlight constitutional malfeasance drown out the
bread-and-butter issues, like the current beef over the cost of beef.
Democrats, as a political class, seem to have forgotten how
to wield power, even when they possess it. I read with mounting fury
Sunday’s New York Times report about how the Joe Biden team
so irretrievably messed up its response to the immigration crisis it created
and, in doing so, lost the election. 2023 saw more than six million
unauthorized immigrants waiting for their cases to be resolved, almost double
the number since 2020. The Biden response, according to this report, was a
combination of dithering base-pandering, dropped balls, and political Bubble
Wrap. It took the diabolical cleverness of Texas governor Greg Abbott and
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who loaded up buses with bemused immigrants and
pointed them in the direction of such liberally oblivious destinations as NYC,
D.C., and—gotta hand it to them—Martha’s Vineyard, to test their fiscal
budgets and sanctuary sympathies. Only then did the Biden White House realize
that, shit, it had to do something. Trump? On the day he took office, he
slammed the border shut.
Trump has proved again and again the old Bill Clinton
adage that Americans prefer wrong and strong to
weak and right. But Trump’s version of strong—brute power winning out over
decency and respect—isn’t the only version in the human repertoire. It’s still
possible to be strong without being morally wrong. Think of American heroes
like Admiral William McRaven, a man as gracious and
human as he is quietly lethal, whose résumé includes commanding the Navy Seal
team that took out Osama bin Laden and the special ops mission that captured
Saddam Hussein. McRaven is a real soldier, not a puffed-up toy one, like the
cavorting flag-draped pip-squeak currently flailing around as Secretary of War.
Trump’s version of strong—brute power
winning out over decency and respect—isn’t the only version in the human
repertoire. It’s still possible to be strong without being morally wrong.
With Trump now tanking in the polls over affordability,
a word he’s doing his best to turn into a sneer, or more strangely—and
hopelessly—into a “hoax,” harbingers of the post-Trump
future are already swirling within a restive MAGA. The reason Trump has focused
so relentlessly in his second term on filling his own coffers is he knows,
whatever he pretends, that there will be no season 3 of his fraying
presidential show. His achievement has been to create a debased rule book for
whoever succeeds him. We can learn from Trump without lionizing him:
1.
Entertainment always wins. Incoming NYC mayor Zohran
Mamdani imbibed that lesson. Make fighting fascism fun. Don’t be too lofty for
social media gimmicks like Mamdani’s polar bear swim off Coney
Island to dramatize his rent-freeze policies.
2.
Exploit leverage. Trump sees a crack in the door and drives
a truck through it. When Israel overreached and fired missiles on Hamas leaders
meeting in Qatar, a valued American ally, he seized on the misstep to strong-arm
Benjamin Netanyahu into a Gaza peace agreement.
3.
Blow through the bureaucrats. You don’t have to be a DOGE
wrecking ball to know that meetings about meetings are the enemies of action.
4.
Keep changing the subject. Except for the eternal
stickiness of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump understood
our national inattention span better than anyone before or since. He’s always
deduced the news cycle’s craving for a fresh angle and made sure to provide it.
But irrelevance comes for all of us. When Trump is a
clapped-out political Liberace honoring himself at benefits in his Mar-a-Lago
ballroom, the legacy of his traumatic presidency will be a rotting pile of red
caps—and the way the game is played.
