Immorality feeds on today’s noxious MAGA brew – a new, feudal Dark Age, truth inquisitions, savage celebrity roasts and system-toppling demolitions? Meet misrule by insular billionaires deluded they’re all geniuses.
Except for speed and range, little that MAGA Trumpism dumps globally should shock those alert to self-entitled, imperialist resource/land grabs, contempt for law, malignant narcissism, and the bellicose nativism that denigrates opposition, real or fabricated. In a word, Project 2025. To satisfy total control fantasies, MAGA Trump must invalidate dissenters, rights activists, immigrants, foreigners, and law-abiding citizens seized by ICE’s octopus grip. Kudos to half-assed MAGA for shredding what remains of presumptuous moral exceptionalism. The old way is crashing hard, a genuine opportunity for a New New Deal.
Illegality aside, coordinated MAGA power-mongering qualifies as immoral for its heartless cruelty, destructiveness, and indiscriminate punishment. When unchecked power rules, wallowing in its abuse of “Radical Left Scum,” then unchecked immorality follows. Rulers hostile to law and justice, let alone irate majority rule, employ anti-social, primal forces in their quest to commandeer all. Trump invokes morality not to validate positive values but deflect the maneuvering of a proto-fascist coup. If one paradigm obliterates all delusions of a nation’s moral core, power-mad fascism is it. So much for John Adams’ assertion that republics survive only when grounded in virtue and moral responsibility.
Something wicked comes: defining immorality
“Immoral conduct” violates widely accepted moral standards, principles of right and wrong, certified ethics, honesty and fairness, causing harm by intention, willful ignorance, derangement, senility or selfishness. Legally, immoral actions endanger public welfare, namely sexual misconduct and predatory abuses of power, undermining elections, education and the health and safety of children and the aged, altogether undermining public trust and commitments to the rule of law. Politically, immorality glorifies lying, hypocrisy, scheming, propaganda, and violence to maximize elitist control (as in autocracy) and incite tribal tensions.
So I focus here on the catastrophic misjudgment that self-described moral/patriotic voters had to ignore both Judeo-Christian and Constitutional values to empower an indecent, scofflaw, mafia-style gang. Trump unearthed an immense, racist, neo-fascist following, readily played by greedy billionaires keen to decommission galling, regulatory correctives. Consider the tragic paradox when wannabe autocrats manipulate democratic elections to dismantle functional, democratic checks and balances on power grabs. In an immoral world, elections answer to the iron will of anti-democrats, not the sovereign majority.
We’re not talking dubious policy decisions (like tariff boomerangs) or even lawless mayhem (masked ICE invaders, arbitrary overseas bombings) but a nasty crusade to carve up and carve out America, forever shiftingpower from the many to the few, from the rule of law to rule by force. If autocrats can get away with homicide (ICE concentration camps, vaccine/medical malpractice, ending USAID), without implacable mass resistance, let’s jettison fictions about the “land of the free and home of the moral.” See Ted Stoermer’s terrific, highly informed videos about what constitutes true resistance to callous oppression (mandating putting everything on the line). What’s equally notable is not just the rightwing coup but the acquiescence by blunted law firms, universities, professional/religious organizations, among other silenced powers.
Most telling, when forcibly challenged on moral grounds and solid American values (Epstein morass only one), defensive MAGA over-reactions double-down, swelling outrageous braggadocio and pumping out more lies. Indeed, the bigger the lie, the more the MAGA gullible swallow the folly. Beyond rhetoric, gestapo ICE tactics, along with criminal missile attacks, personify immorality in action, dramatized by a total recklessness to distinguish the innocent (citizens) from the innocent until proven guilty. The closest analogies – the dastardly Chinese Exclusion Act and the worst reign of terror against loyal citizens, WWII Japanese internment, inexcusable betrayals of what a country of immigrants is all about.
Trump the terrible, terrorist president
Trump and his cabinet now only spotlight the most immoral of MAGA calamities. DOGE stands as the most needlessly life-denying, most money-wasting mockery of D.C. “reform” ever – oblivious to dire outcomes or rational standbys. Ditto, Trump’s unilateral, impulsive demolition of the WH East Wing, the greatest symbol YET of gall married to ruthlessness, absent even bad planning or facades of approvals. The pillage and plunder of mass pleonexia, the uncontrolled, scurrilous “taking” of what rightly belongs to others.
The ludicrous, ass-kissing House leadership seethes with dishonesty, cowardice, and immorality, bowing to whatever brutality Trump officials make national policy. That spineless Republicans in Congress betray the integrity of Congress (and their own oaths), as if the Constitution evaporated, drips with infamy. That the Supreme Court now houses six corrupt collaborators speaks to its immoral descent – and like Trump, out in the open. Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Roberts are payola gluttons, gifted by folks with SC cases; Thomas and Kavanaugh are arguably sexual harassers. Justice disintegrates when top judges, like the president, are above the law, threatened only by infeasible impeachment. They poison the entire judicial well.
That the DOJ is now reduced to a politically-weaponized cudgel of an immoral president confirms its punitive immorality. The only difference between this DOJ and Trump’s cadre of private legal nincompoops is who pays the bill. Gross favoritism on antitrust and anti-monopoly violations are the order of the day, banishing naive notions the core executive mission is to independently enforce laws of the land. So much for another despoiled myth. Equally suspect in the service of life-denying corruption is the mind-blowing abandonment of science, research and expertise in RFK Jr.’s bizarro Health and Human Services Dept. When the driving healthcare force is willful ignorance about basic medical realities, costly, fatal, immoral consequences follow. Gosh, what’s lower than wiping out living citizens, first from Covid and now gross negligence towards vaccines, medications and methods once thought to improve life and liberty? If healthcare is not about saving lives and alleviating suffering, we have a conspiracy-laden, untrustworthy Anti-doctor at the doomed helm.
Flooding the zone: chaos, disruption, wickedness
In short, the four horses of the Apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, death) already flood the zone. How can pandering to Putin not expose American liability for war crimes against civilians, infrastructure and living spaces? How can failing to curb Israel from FURTHER Gaza genocide not make American morally culpable, enabling despicable horror? Ditto, attacking anonymous Venezuelan fishing boats, or arbitrarily bombing Iran or Nigeria, is an especially evil way to impress the Nobel Peace prize committee. Not capturing one drug runner, then establishing facts in a trial, defines immoral war crimes, among Trump’s most inhumane blunders. Either we have legal procedures buttressing American justice or chaotic, PR belligerence shreds any global concepts of international law. Sabre-rattling against countries not even thinking of attacking us, like Greenland or Venezuela, represent immoral mockeries of foreign affairs.
In short, evidence for indisputable immorality infecting rightwing MAGA politics – plus inadequate resistance by the intimidated, Dems included – comes thicker and faster than DT’s tweets. Treating MAGA Trumpism as just another political movement is a drastic blunder. One doesn’t defeat the surge of primal, in part unconscious forces (like boundless avarice or total domination) with reason, evidence or sporadic compromises. Fascist types feast on perceived weakness.
When confronting a violent, insatiable bully with more political/military force than the combined opposition, direct aggression will not work, exposing weakness against shows of strength. Clever resistance uses more nuanced aikido methods, leveraging the abusive power of your opponent to gain the upper hand, either passively or via constant protest and pressure. Yes, the MAGA Trump implosion is mastering the art of self-destruction, but forever standing by simple, exemplary, even universal religious and ethical moral standards, is a necessary resistance mandate. America may well descend further into moral infamy, but it won’t happen in a vacuum devoid of spirited, rapidly increasing protesters.
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