What Trump has taught me about you.
By: Duncan A Sabien
Tags: Morality, Trump, Society, 2020, Election 2020

I’ve been trying and trying and trying to write the essay that lays out the justification for the following in clear, calm, emotionless, objective detail, including all the little bits of game theory and decision theory and consequentialism and history that make up the overall worldview, but I am so very tired and I do not know if that essay will ever see the light of day.

Absent that legwork, I say the following merely on the strength of my own character and judgment:

As someone who is allied with neither political party and often openly dismayed by and publicly critical of both the blue tribe and the red tribe, I will simply never again be able to trust someone who votes this year for Donald Trump.

I do not feel this way about the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. I was not an ideological “never Trumper.”

I do not feel this way about the people who voted for McCain in 2008, or Obama either.

I do not feel this way about people who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, or people who voted for Bush or Gore in 2000, or Kerry in 2004, or any of the other nominees in the 2016 race, or any previous presidency in my lifetime. I do not feel this way about people who disagree with me about abortion, or about the various wars we have been in, or about the role of government in medicine or education or the economy.

But what it means to be able to trust someone is to know in advance roughly what they will do and how they respond, and also to believe that those actions and responses will be good.

If we are sports competitors, to trust you is to be confident that you will not cheat or trip me up.

If we are business partners, or even business rivals, to trust you is to know that you will not steal from me, or lie to me, or breach contract without cause and without reparation.

And if we are fellow humans in a society, to trust you is to believe that you will be basically decent, and basically principled — that you will in fact stand up for the good, in opposition to the bad. That where we disagree, you will be consistent and comprehensible — if you believe in the Christian god and I do not, for instance, I will be able to predict our disagreements by referring to the words of Christ and the general consensus modern day interpretations of the Christian faith. I will be able to point to your actions and say “while I think these are wrong, I can see where, if I believed what you believe, I would take the same actions myself.”

It means that I can rely on your boundaries. That I can repose faith in the fact that you have dealbreakers, and bright lines that you will not cross. Perhaps I cannot trust you to (for instance) spend your own personal resources in supporting LGBTQ folk, since you personally find a lot of the LGBTQ agenda objectionable and dangerous. But I can trust you to intervene if you see a young LGBTQ teenager being beaten on the subway, because that crosses the line for you, and you will not stomach it in silence.

The people who are still, this year, intending to cast a vote for Trump cannot be trusted in this way.

If Trump does a thing, they will find a way to either justify it as being okay in and of itself, or tolerable as the price of some other objective. In Trump’s own words: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

(He said that before he was voted in the first time.)

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when Trump openly advocated sexual assault, and sexualized his own daughter, and ten-year-old girls, and walked in on teenage girls in changing rooms, and befriended Epstein and Maxwell, and was credibly accused by more than two dozen women, then I don’t give a shit about your protestations to be upstanding and moral when it comes to defending people’s physical and sexual safety everywhere else. If all of the above, much of which is on tape and irrefutable, was insufficient to move you to action, then I have no earthly idea what you would find unacceptable. You are unreliable as a defender of women, and as a defender of sexual morality.

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when Trump called John McCain a loser, and fired and denigrated General Mattis, and oversaw an administration that siphoned nearly four million dollars away from the 9/11 heroes’ fund—

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when Trump told three natural-born US citizen congresswomen to “go back where they came from”—

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when official after official after official in Trump’s campaign and administration was charged with corruption, and official after official plead guilty to fraud and perjury and witness tampering and election meddling—

(“It’s not that he knew they were corrupt, or participated in the corruption, it’s just that he’s that consistently poor a judge of character!” is the defense, I suppose?)

—or when he used his power of pardon for purely personal reasons, including openly discussing pardoning himself—

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when Trump himself encouraged his constituents to attempt voter fraud, and decimated the United States Postal Service for the explicit purpose of making it harder for American citizens in blue states to vote—

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when Trump allowed peaceful protestors to be gassed for a photo op, or publicly gloated about reporters being targeted and injured by police—

If it was not a dealbreaker for you when Trump openly and repeatedly lied to the American people about the dangers of coronavirus, and openly and repeatedly lied to the American people about how the crisis was progressing, and either instructed or allowed his agents and officials to lean on the institutions meant to give us the truth to distort their messages to fit his agenda, and continually denigrated and undermined simple, commonsense precautions that would have saved tens of thousands of lives, and spoke openly about how the death record would be better if it left out the states that didn’t vote for him (which was barely true anyway, and growing closer to false by the day), and oversaw the preventable and unnecessary deaths of a 9/11’s worth of American citizens every three or four days for the past six months—

(“I don’t take responsibility at all,” says the man who fired the pandemic task force put in place by George W. Bush, and strengthened by his predecessor Obama, and who is on tape in February asserting that the virus is dangerous and virulent while publicly offering empty reassurances to people so as not to cause a panic—all the while massively overblowing non-threats and inventing others out of whole cloth to energize his base—)

Deep breath.

I’m sorry. I’m losing the thread. This particular essay is not about Trump.

It is about you.

You, who are voting for Donald Trump in 2020, are unreliable as a defender of constitutional principle. You are unreliable as a defender of basic moral integrity, and Christian values. You are unreliable in your claims to care about the health and happiness of your fellow Americans. You are unreliable in your claims to care about corruption, and in your claims to care about truth.

You may, in fact, care about these things under certain circumstances, and fight for them from time to time, when it’s convenient for you. But I cannot rely on you to fight for them consistently, which means I cannot rely on you to be there when it matters.

Your behavior is not explained by genuine care for any of the above. If it were, then at least one of the misdeeds referenced above (or the many more I did not have the stamina to list) would have compelled you to remove your support from Donald J. Trump, and to instead endorse some other, more principled member of your tribe—perhaps one of the scores of lifelong Republicans who have openly repudiated the excesses and failures of the current sitting President.

But you did not do that. You chose the path of selfish convenience, or local expediency, or savage satisfaction, at every turn.

I’ll admit—it’s easy to get snookered. To be tricked, misled, deceived. Many of the people who supported Obama in 2008 were hoodwinked, too, and did not get many of the things they were explicitly promised. Much of what is now incontrovertible about Donald Trump was known or suspected even back in 2016, and I have friends who look at me askance for not writing this essay then.

But (perhaps like you) I was trying to be generous, and to account for uncertainty, and to be humble in the face of disagreement from a third of my fellow countrymen, and to hold optimism for the future, and to be graceful in the time-honored tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, just as I tried to be graceful when Bush handed power to Obama.

After all, the things that Trump voters want are mostly worth wanting! A tiny and unrepresentative minority of overt bigotry aside, I want those same things! The things that Trump voters fear are mostly worth fearing! While some of those fears are irrationally overblown, if they weren’t I would be every bit as concerned! The people on the left who dismiss the concerns of Trump voters, and decry tens of millions of their fellow citizens as being fundamentally racist or sexist or ignorant, are appalling and wrong, and damnably guilty of contributing to the pressures that are widening the rift in our country.

But it’s no longer about what Trump voters wanted. It’s no longer about the goods they were and are trying to purchase. It’s now about the price they are willing to pay for those goods—the things they are willing to overlook, to handwave away as the cost of doing business.

This should not be humdrum.

It’s hard—very hard—to let yourself see that you were conned, or that your faith was misplaced. And it’s even harder to admit it out loud, and own up to it. “I was fooled. I was wrong.”

But you have not even had to do that!

You have not been put in a position where you would have to go back on your previous endorsements in order to change course. Ceasing your support of Donald Trump does not require you to unwind any of your commitments, or enter into the embrace of your ideological opponents (see the Lincoln Project for an obvious example). There has been new scandal after new scandal after new scandal—endless opportunities to save face—to say “okay, even given my support of everything up to this point, I have now reached my limit.”

You’ve had chance after chance to get down off the Trump train with honor intact, and to be welcomed by groups like the libertarians or the evangelicals against Trump—people who hold dear the very same things you cherish, small government and fiscal responsibility and infant rights and American jobs. Chance after chance to say “yes to all of that, still, but here is where I draw the line. Here is where I won’t support someone even if they’re on my side about all the other stuff.”

But you have refused each and every such chance. With every opportunity to demonstrate that you have limits, that you have standards, that you do in fact have spine and moral fiber—with every opportunity passed up, you have forced me further and further toward what is now the only possible logical conclusion: that you have no actual limits at all. That nothing will deter you, and nothing will disgust you. That every dealbreaker you would have cited, if I’d somehow known to ask you, back in 2016, was a convenient fiction. That you are capable of breezing past literally dozens of scandals, each of which would have been enough by itself to sink a politician of a few years ago, untroubled and undeterred (except maybe in lip service).

I cannot depend on you to be my ally in the fight for truth, when your chosen representative is an unrepentant liar.

I cannot depend on you to be my ally in the fight for justice, when the man you put your name behind works tirelessly to subvert it.

I will continue to fight for many of the same things you’re fighting for. I will continue to agree with you on many of the issues, and vote alongside you for the same policies more than half the time. But I will do so with a dizzying sense that something has gone horribly wrong. I cannot depend on you to be my ally in the fight to heal the central wound festering at the heart of this nation—to bring us back together on the common ground, to relearn the principles of tolerance and compromise, to instill once again the habit of doing the tough and inconvenient thing in the moment, because it upholds and bolsters some load-bearing support without which our society cannot survive in the long term.

(In case it isn’t obvious, I categorically reject the narrative that a vote for not-Trump is a vote for not-the-conservative-agenda. That’s patently false, in the particularly insidious way where it gains momentum specifically from people believing in it, in a sort of self-fulfilling-prophecy, until you get otherwise sane and reasonable people saying sentences like “the best way to move the country in the right direction given my values is to vote for Donald Trump.” It is because I have some standard, sensible conservative values that voting for Trump is inconceivable. You can’t get to the highest mountain peak by insisting on only going uphill from your starting point; that’s how you end up stuck at a local maximum. You have to be able to jump ship and try again with a different upward slope. You have to be able to recognize that Trump gets you closer in the short term, but leaves you stranded in the long run.)

You likely will not care that I feel this way. You likely will respond to this by either laughing at the pwnage, or reverse-victiming and accusing me of being the one who has abandoned reason and responsibility, or rounding me off to just another blue triber, or saying that this proves that I never cared about [whatever] in the first place. You likely will point to the outrages that the blue tribe enacted upon the red in the recent past, as if that is justification for the kind of shocking escalation we’ve seen since 2016.

(I’m on record in multiple places as saying that a lot of this seems to me to descend from the outrageous treatment of George W. Bush by the left after 2004, and the refusal of the blue tribe to police the worst excesses of its own fringe. That mistreatment directly fueled the right’s reprisals against Obama, which led inexorably to the situation we find ourselves in today. I understand how it happened, but—when one of your children comes to you with a black eye given to them by their sibling, do you tell that child to go get a knife from the kitchen? And if that child grabs the knife on their own, do you start marshaling arguments in their defense?)

I cannot bring myself to feel disappointment or hurt, when I imagine Trump loyalists (even my own family members, and lifelong friends) responding to me with those dismissals, those accusations, those excuses. Because those responses are coming from someone who thinks the president is doing just fine, thank you very much, and the discovery that I am thought less of by someone who looks at the past four years, and takes a morning off work and gets out of bed and gets in their car and drives to a polling station and freely and willingly signs their own name to a ballot cast in favor of a second helping of it—

(Here I pause for a moment to go online to check the number of Americans who have died from COVID-19 since I started writing this essay a few hours ago. It’s 97, which is more than the deaths from every riot and protest in the past six months even if you include the people killed by police or right-wing counterprotestors.)

When (as an example) Christians and atheists argue, one reason that the conversation tends to spin its wheels is that there is an unacknowledged difference over what even counts as evidence. To a Christian, faith-without-evidence is seen as a virtue; to an atheist, it’s seen as a fundamental mistake. Unless the conversation manages to address this mismatch directly, each side will be offering what-it-thinks-are-strong-arguments without understanding why they simply don’t seem to matter much to the opposition.

There is a similar skipped beat in most of the conversations I’ve had about President Donald Trump. It’s a background assumption that I see Trump’s opponents take for granted, and his supporters either quietly ignore or outright dismiss.

That assumption is:

X → Y ≡ ¬Y → ¬X

What this means in everyday English is:

“If X, then Y” means the same thing as “if not Y, then not X.”

Or, in more detail: if it’s true that X always leads to Y, then if you look around and you don’t see Y happening, then you must not have any X. Because if there was X in the first place, it would cause Y, see? A world where observing X tells you there must be Y is the same as a world where observing not-Y tells you there isn’t any X.

This straightforward little fact is everywhere in conversations about Donald Trump where his supporters and his detractors somehow fail to see eye-to-eye. Like the question of evidence vis-a-vis religious faith, one side is relying on it for their conclusions, and the other seems to think it’s irrelevant, and thus, little actual progress is made.

“If Donald Trump actually cared about preventing panic and keeping the public calm, he wouldn’t say disproportionate, false, and inflammatory things about BLM and antifa and mail fraud and migrant invasion. Since he is saying disproportionate, false, and inflammatory things about BLM and antifa and mail fraud and migrant invasion, he must not actually care about preventing panic and reassuring the public.”

That’s how it goes when I reason about the president, and his motivations—when I try to make sense of his actions, to choose between competing theories that each purport to explain why he’s doing what he does.

If Donald Trump cared about protecting the integrity of our elections—

If Donald Trump cared about corruption—

If Donald Trump cared about saving American lives—

When I turn that same lens on you:

If you had any scrap of reliable decency in you at all—decency that can’t be overruled by convenience or retribution or political maneuvering, decency that isn’t contingent on anything but is just simply decency—you would have long ago ceased to allow Donald Trump to represent you. Something would have been too much for you to swallow.

Since you have not withdrawn your support—since you are now about to go out and intentionally cast a ballot in his favor, ignoring your many, many alternatives—

(You could vote third party, you could write in Mitt Romney, you could abstain entirely, you could hold your nose and vote for him but go out and publish your own essay detailing everything you find objectionable about his gross misconduct, and explain what, precisely, you are purchasing via the grave price of voting for him anyway, so that your children and grandchildren and neighbors and colleagues don’t get confused and draw the obvious conclusion that you’re simply in favor of all of it, or at least not sufficiently appalled by any of it to actually bother to raise your voice aloud in objection, in the way that thousands of your more principled fellow Republicans are doing right now.)

—since you’re planning to do that, there’s only one conclusion to draw.

If you had moral standards that had the capacity to move you, you would have moved by now. Since you haven’t, you don’t.

To hell with your protestations that you care about the things that matter. To hell with your ludicrous claims that Joe Biden is the greater of the two evils. To hell with your claims that the crux of the matter is leadership, or integrity, or the protection of the American way of life of the last hundred years.

You are not a person who will help enforce the boundary between right and wrong, and reliably choose right. You aren’t just abstaining from the tug-of-war, or pulling the rope sideways. You are actively fighting for depravity, at a moment when just a small number of people not doing that—just a small number of people choosing instead to listen to the note of dismay and objection that no doubt has been there the whole time, while they fought not to hear it—would be enough to tip the balance toward depravity being repudiated.

And given that, I do not trust you.

Make of that whatever you wish.