The Democrats’ focus on affordability seems to be a winning strategy (we’ll know for sure in a little over two weeks). But we mustn’t lose sight of the moral squalor at the core of the Trump regime and the necessity of ending it.
It’s that moral squalor – the utter disregard for the opinions, norms and ideals of the nation and, for that matter, of humanity – that uniquely marks Trump and the reprobates he has attracted to Washington. It has also poisoned much of the Republican party, including the billionaires and tech bros who finance it.
To put this despicable era behind us, we’ll need to renounce and reverse this squalor.
What are loosely described as Trump’s “conflicts of interest”, for example, extend way beyond enriching himself from his presidency. He has violated the norms of presidential decency.
He recently decided to host the Group of 20 annual summit of world leaders at his private golf club in Miami in December. When he sought to do this during his first term, it was viewed as a blatant violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution. Now, after America’s moral sensibilities have been numbed by Trump’s appetite for foreign gifts – such as Qatar’s “donation” of a $400m jumbo jet – it barely merits a mention.
Trump’s social media platform Truth Social could reportedly charge up to $100,000 a month for access to “Truth API”, a service that gives subscribers access to potentially market-moving posts by high-profile users such as Trump “in milliseconds”. The service, in other words, enables subscribers to make lucrative stock market trades off market-moving information coming from the president.
A company linked to his family files a trademark application for “Trump TV” to control the name of a streaming service that the White House uses for official presidential communications, thereby pocketing the benefits from taxpayer funds used to create and run the channel.
His family-backed crypto firm introduces a stablecoin just months before he signs legislation promoting that type of cryptocurrency. His wife is paid tens of millions for a self-promotional film by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, a federal contractor and major retailer subject to a myriad of regulations. His son has a Russian oligarch, close to Putin, pick up the tab for part of his wedding afterparty in the Bahamas.
He arranges for the justice department to grant him and his family immunity for any back taxes and penalties they might owe.
And so on. Trump has tossed away all constraints on making money off his presidency “because I got no credit in the first term” and “I found out that nobody cared”.
Credit? Someone who is entrusted with the highest office in the land must receive “credit” for doing what’s right, in order to continue doing what’s right? Nobody cares? A president can embrace corruption if the public doesn’t mind?
It’s not just the blatant self-dealing. His moral squalor extends to every aspect of governing.
He lies incessantly – a gushing firehose of deception.
His foreign policies make Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik seem principled by comparison. He orders the abduction of the president of another nation, installs a new president of his choosing, and announces he’s taking that nation’s oil – and doesn’t even account for what he does with the oil money.
He attacks Iran without consulting America’s traditional allies or even Congress.
He turns his back on Ukraine and sides with Putin, the aggressor in that conflict. He pursues diesel oil from Putin in violation of US sanctions on Russia and blames the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for high oil prices rather than Trump’s war on Iran. He says Ukraine should get a new president.
The moral squalor extends to usurping the authority of Congress to decide on tariffs, wars and whether and how to spend taxpayer money.
It extends to his cynical defiance of supreme court orders. When the court invalidates his tariffs, he reimposes them under a different statute. When the court rules that he doesn’t have grounds to remove a member of the Fed board of governors, he concocts a means to do so anyway. When the court says he has to remove his name from the Kennedy Center, he closes the center and threatens to demolish it.
It extends to his using the justice department and the FBI to prosecute people who have stood up to him, including courageous officials.
It extends to his claims that Mexicans are “bringing drugs and crime”; calling Somali-Americans “garbage” and denouncing “what they’ve done to Minnesota, these people from Somalia”; and taunting Muslims, including by calling Dr Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan, “Mohammed”.
It extends to giving a gigantic tax cut to America’s wealthiest people, financed by cutting nutrition assistance and healthcare to America’s most vulnerable people.
The moral squalor has turned much of America into a police state – terrorizing large numbers of people residing here, including many here legally.
Deploying ICE agents at schools, courthouses and hospitals. Forcibly taking parents away from their children. Allowing masked gunmen without identification to grab suspected undocumented immigrants off our streets, from their cars, and out of their homes – giving them no opportunity to defend themselves in front of third parties before putting them into often overcrowded and unhealthy prisons or sending them to other countries where they’re imprisoned. Killing people.
When asked if there are limits to his authority, Trump replies: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“My own” morality is no morality at all. Morality reflects collective judgments about right and wrong, shared values about what we owe one another as citizens of the same society. Morality refers to the ideals we seek to achieve together.
Trump is not guided by any sense of right and wrong. He is guided only by what enriches him or gives him more power and glory – a nihilistic might-makes-right in which the strong do whatever they want and the weak suffer what they must.
To be sure, Trump’s moral squalor could not have permeated America – he could not have been elected a second time – had our shared norms and ideals not already been compromised.
Vast inequalities of income and wealth, coupled with a growing sense that the social contract at the heart of the American system was coming undone and that those at the top have rigged the game, were already fueling anger and distrust. Trump ignited that fuel.
Without shared ideals or common moral values, there is nothing pushing back against this despicable president and regime – no countervailing moral force against the ongoing squalor.
Part of the project of ridding ourselves of Trump, therefore, must be to rekindle our understanding of the common good and appreciation of what we owe one another as members of the same society.
Of course we must make life more affordable; Democrats are wise to emphasize this in the midterms. But we also must demand common decency.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK
