The incontestably lawless, court-rejecting MAGA Trump record exposes a willful, immoral agenda, with its scary mix of caprice, chaos and brutality that only serve a deluded base, elite special interests—and one deranged ego.
Let’s rephrase this alarming environmental report entitled, Can America’s Wolves Survive an Onslaught of Political Attacks? Instead, “Can America survive a relentless onslaught of immoral, destabilizing attacks”? AWOL today are moral, even Judeo-Christian norms for compromise, community and compassion that once checked political criminality at historic turning points—when predatory capitalistic excesses and contempt for citizen rights erupted. What tipped the scale were collective, legal and systemic reforms against regressive working conditions, unjust taxation, and octopus monopolies—serially confronted by the Progressive Age, New Deal reforms on mammoth economic injustices, then humane ‘60s advances that reformulated racial and minority freedoms, plus women’s, health, housing, employment, retirement, and gender rights
In his influential Moral Politics cognitive linguist George Lakoff demonstrates how all politics are based on morality. Per google AI, “political stances are not just about policy or logic; they are expressions of what an individual believes is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for society.” Who doubts that MAGA Trump has degraded from the mere, first-term,“amoral transactionalism” to rampaging immorality—the opposite to rational “deal-making” because of chronic lose-lose outcomes. Name any humane or health benefits (except for privileged, deregulated industries) from scorched-earth, DOGE demolition? Or meaningful majority payoffs from last year’s regressive tax giveaway? Who truly benefits from brutal ICE deportations—not just the murders and abuses, but needless, inflation-spurring, body blows to essential workers facilitating core industries?
Need we add indiscriminate, headline-driven violence against Venezuelans—or how “lethal” Hegseth “warriors” wiped out Iranian school children and scores of nonthreatening civilians? Who gains from self-defeating, immoral attacks on Canada (incurring high, benefit-less costs), or Greenland/Denmark, or the tantrum of a lose-lose Cuban boycott? Such indefensible dead ends align with linked immorality: 1) refusal to pressure Russia to stop its heinous Ukrainian invasion; 2) forever enabling Israeli genocide of Gaza civilians; and 3) the latest outrage against Iran, termed the “worst foreign policy decision in our history.” How immoral the president who quips, “I don’t care” about finding a truce, or that he stops bombing only when feeling it “in his bones.” As if no one else on the planet, including thousands killed and homeless, truly exists or matters.
Tolerating evil by denying the obvious
Two overwhelming points rise like maimed eagles: not only is MAGA Trump the most willfully destructive, immoral regime, even more telling—where is the collective outrage against this weekly parade by cruelty-addictive evil-doers? No Kings is great protest but not enough. What morally deficient country tolerates blatant wickedness without rising up to avert the next outrage? His re-election was bad enough; tolerance of evil is worse. Until a defiant majority larger than today’s 60 percent+ shouts out loud, “enough, more than enough,” with clout to terrorize morally spineless MAGA lackeys in government, media, culture and legal systems, our “moral barometer” tests another new low. Either we confront monsters, “policy” and slogans aside, or we undermine America as “the home of the free and the land of the brave” where “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” once meant something. Chaos and immoral blundering despoil “let freedom ring.”
Nations, like true believers ingesting their own BS, resist change without multiple 2 X 4s, even when the self-indulgent egotist in charge is so defective we don’t know which personality failings dominate—whether derangement, ignorance, senility or power-madness. Either the majority starts to redeem broken systems or painful historic contradictions invite even greater disasters. An uncurbed Trump won’t stop himself.
What backward voters in 2024 expected to escape unscathed by ignoring the greatest (moral) predictor of all? A certified life history. Trump’s multiple convictions, by diverse juries of his peers, on sexual abuse, tax cheating, charity and racial housing discrimination violations fully anticipate the last year’s infamy. A serial felon is by societal standards an immoral deviant, thus justifying punishment. What about the yet-to-be confirmed illegality of fraudulently poisoning elections nor vicious calumny against judges and courts that won’t bow the knee? Or vendettas against reporters and media that dare ask realistic if humiliating questions? Was blackmailing Ukraine years ago, arguably his most immoral illegality as president, or corruptly stealing, then mishandling state secrets, not undeniable evidence of an nonredeemable deviant?
We need not even have final proof of his most sensational, not yet indicted private crimes—abusing juvenile girls—via intimacy with pedophile Epstein or the cynical, laughable cover-up. Public immorality make the point—slandering all Democrats (or critics or former, “disloyal” advisers) as crazed, traitorous, criminal or lunatics, or coarsely gloating when one made-up enemy dies (Robert Mueller), or relishing the murderous bombing of Iranians as frivolous good fun—or repeating atrocious bad jokes serving up violent cruelty.
To sum up, as when addressing climate change betrayals, veteran columnist and federal trial attorney Sabrina Haake wonders “whether Trump is a death force meant to accelerate our species’ removal from the planet . . . [which] of unfathomable intelligence, is hastening our demise so it can get back to healthy trees, clean mountain air, and streams full of salmon. If Trump is but a malignancy meant to usher us off the earth more quickly, maybe MAGA is right, he really is ‘chosen’.”
Humanity tied directly to morality
Ditto the headline from AlterNet, Trump has destroyed humanity to protect his own exposure: Trump’s administration, declared Rory Stewart, former diplomat and British Parliament member, is defined by his paranoid worldview that sees enemies everywhere. Writing for The iPaper, Stewart seconded critics who’ve bashed the president for destroying norms, guardrails, and institutions, “now destroyed morality itself.”
Stewart explains how “Trump’s deep fear of exposure has led him to seek to dominate all criticism . . . everywhere there appears to be an assault on democratic norms and institutions [as Trump] staff [wrongly claims] “that’s illegal” or “the Supreme Court will shoot it down.” Any judge who gets in his way is “disloyal” . . . Any reporter who dares to catch him in mistakes, hypocrisy or inconsistencies is “fake news.” Anyone who dares to criticize him faces threats of prosecutors, fines egging on supporters conditioned to turn Trump’s vendetta into their own violence.
Stewart concludes that Trump’s paranoid style has torpedoed political discourse and civic life. Every minor disagreement is an existential betrayal. Any attempt at bipartisan compromise has given way to a “my way or the highway” way of governing. “He normalizes hostility, leaving little room for the shared reality democracy requires. The cost has become a fractured nation where morality, truth and decency became collateral damage” [my BF].
That demands an historic breakthrough—beginning with new Democratic leadership as the only plausible reform agent today (like it or not). More AOCs, Sanders and Squad members; fewer Schumers and no more Fettermans. Per Stewart, we must reframe institutions around a “shared moral space” that focuses on “humanity and morality.” Not another “savior” but a new society that prizes ethics, embraces “better electoral systems, tighter social media rules, much tougher financing rules, citizens assemblies” and reforms governing the lawmakers themselves. Americans must fiercely reestablish workable moral values because only that confronts a manifestly immoral, insular and rampaging MAGA team committed to total, top-down authoritarian control, already demonstrating brutality and violence across this twisted universe.
America must foster a redemptive collective to find moral common ground and political clout to correct the nasty mindset trapped inside Trump’s instinctive outlaw gut, pontificating that his infallible manias justify any means to his limitless, imperial ends. If morality means anything, that starts with full public rebukes by diverse voices of the worst, most selfish aspects of human nature, then strict, enforceable controls to close the drastic systemic vulnerabilities that MAGA has and is exposing in spades. Like our republic, per Ben Franklin, the mandate is a necessary vision of sustained democratic values and morality—but only “if we can keep it.”
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