Can't Get Any Lower, But Still We Keep On Sinking
America plummets deeper and deeper into Donald Trump's moral black hole—but don't give up yet
We interrupt our new war in the Middle East to return to our previously scheduled descent into national moral depravity.
It feels like lifetimes ago now, but President Trump’s nakedly partisan, solipsistic speech in front of a group of self-selected troops at Fort Bragg (nee Fort Liberty)—coming right as his administration deployed active-duty Marines to the streets of Los Angeles to back up lawless Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city and just ahead of a much-ballyhooed military parade in Washington, DC—marked another new low in American public life and morality. But as understandable as the rush to cover the next shiny object may be, especially when it involves serious questions of war and peace, we cannot ignore this seemingly inexorable national slide deeper and deeper into Trump’s moral abyss, letting it go unnoticed and unremarked—or worse, treated as somehow normal and without any real objection.
Indeed, Trump’s mere presence in our public life seriously deforms and distorts it. It’s not just his simple vulgarity (witness his bizarre West Point commencement speech that dwelled on the supposed perfidy of “trophy wives,” for instance) or his apparently innate baseness and incurable venality—it’s his attack on the notion of the common good, shared sacrifice, and even the basic idea of society itself.
In much the same way as a black hole or any other sufficiently large gravity source distorts light, Trump warps our own public morality and our elemental sense of society as a shared enterprise. His repeated, specific transgressions matter, whether they involve brazenly breaking the law, using his position to enrich himself and punish his supposed enemies, or simply speaking like an emotionally stunted teenager with impulse control issues. But these discrete episodes matter more because they incarnate our moral degeneration and manage to deepen it even further at the same time.
Take Trump’s June 10 Fort Bragg speech. It’s bad enough on its own terms, containing as it did Trump’s de facto declaration of war against the half of the country that doesn’t support him and blatant attempt to turn the United States military into a personal, partisan political instrument. But the damage done by Trump’s remarks goes even deeper and radiates out even further: it’s an assault on the very concepts of a shared public life, service to that public and its stated ideals, and the defense of the public as a whole—not just those who pledge allegiance to Trump and his political movement.
Worse still, Trump continually injects his own mean-spirited, narcissistic values into the body politic: rules, morality, and ideals are for suckers, and you’re stupid if you don’t take advantage of others for your own personal benefit. It’s all good as long as you don’t get caught—and if you do get caught, just whine about how very unfair it all is to you and how persecuted you’ve been. There’s no way for society to survive in even a minimal sense on the basis of this spiteful and solipsistic ethos, one that Trump will continue to promote so long as he’s a presence in public life.
For the better part of the past decade, we’ve been slowly and steadily descending into Trump’s moral black hole—and with each passing day, our descent only accelerates. America received an all-too-brief respite from this daily debasement for a couple of years under President Biden, but that obviously wasn’t enough to arrest the nation’s overall trajectory. Matters are even worse now, as Trump and his minions overtly attack and undermine the foundations of democratic self-government and, indeed, society itself in just the first several months of his second term. And our national predicament will only grow more dire moving forward over the more than three and a half years Trump has remaining in office.
Can it be fixed?
I don’t know. We’ve had a decade for the moral rot to set in, and set in it has—and there’s still more time for it to sink even deeper in. The pessimistic case that Trump will warp our collective morality permanently therefore has credibility and cannot be simply dismissed out of hand.
Still, it’s possible to take some small comfort in both the recent protests against Trump and the fact that our national cultural schizophrenia ensures that the seeds of civic virtue and personal morality remain scattered across popular culture. Three or so artifacts in particular come to my mind:
The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. From the very start, the MCU has portrayed deeply flawed individuals who embrace ideals larger than themselves and band together—whether as the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, or Thunderbolts—to protect and defend humanity from the depredations of would-be gods. The notions of self-sacrifice and heroism as a higher calling these characters embrace that stand in stark contrast to the petty egoism and avarice of Trump, Elon Musk, and their ilk. Nor should it be any surprise that Star Wars imagery has appeared at protests against Trump, what with the second season of Andor dwelling extensively on resistance to fascism and the demented but uncanny prophecy of democracy’s self-destruction articulated by George Lucas in his prequel trilogy.
The Swiftie counterculture. You had to have been at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to fully and truly capture the camaraderie, exuberant fellow-feeling, and collective effervescence involved, but the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Chris Riemenschneider came close when he declared that “If there's a blueprint for a future utopia in the year 2023, it could come from a Swift concert.” It’s not as if the hunger for this sense of euphoria and fellowship has faded away, either, if the emerging panoply of Swift- and Eras Tour-themed pop-up bars and tribute acts is to be believed.
The Daily Stoic. Proprietor Ryan Holiday has done his best to beat real Stoicism into the heads of his readers, social media followers, and podcast listeners, especially in recent months. It’s easy to dismiss Holiday as a promoter of pop Stoicism who offers up the philosophy as a nothing more than a trite life-hack, but spend a bit of time on the feeds of the Daily Stoic or Holiday himself and it’s not difficult to see how he’s trying to advocate for the philosophy as a whole.
This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, obviously, but it’s not hard to see how prominent strains of American popular culture stand in direct if implicit opposition to the self-centered, small-minded, and plain mean culture fostered by Trump and his MAGA acolytes. So all is not lost; indeed, far from it, if you know where to look—and you don’t need to look all that far.
That leaves open the question of what we can do at an individual level to keep ourselves from falling further into the gravitational pull of Trump’s moral corruption. It’s nigh impossible to keep ourselves completely free from it, but we can turn to the Stoics themselves and Marcus Aurelius in particular to help us keep at least our heads above water.
Serving as emperor amidst the always potentially lethal backbiting of Roman imperial high politics, Marcus constantly took pains to remind himself to not be corrupted by either his own position or the machinations that swirled about him at court, to remain true to his chosen philosophy of life, and to recognize that humanity is social and rational by nature. “Beware of becoming Caesarified,” he warns himself in his Meditations (6.30),“dyed in purple.” Elsewhere (5.16), he tells himself that since it’s possible to live well anywhere it’s possible to live well “in a palace” before going on to recall that rational beings like humans “were born for community.”
That’s an attitude we’d all do well to adopt for ourselves as Trump drags us all ever-deeper into the moral black hole he’s made for us. We may be at further remove from the event horizon than was Marcus in his day, but we can and should do all we can to keep ourselves from succumbing to the gravitational field of moral depravity emanating from the White House—one that stresses and strains and threatens to eventually snap the bonds that hold society together.
If we do that, we can hold onto the rational hope that we can, in fact, fix our broken and degraded society once our present ordeal comes to a final and definitive end.