The Blowing Out of the Moral Lights – Trump’s Awful

AB: Run down on the Trump – Musk Get Together

by Bill Kristol

I’m grateful to Andrew for listening to Donald Trump and Elon Musk last night and sparing me that unpleasantness.

But I did listen to some of the clips this morning.

Here’s my take: Trump’s awful.

This is, I acknowledge, not breaking news. Trump’s awfulness has been so obvious for so long, and we now take it so much for granted, that it seems silly or gauche to point it out.

Still at the risk of seeming overly earnest or moralistic, I am once again going to point it out:

Trump. Is. Bad. Uncommonly bad, even by the standards of today’s politics. And he’s someone whose depravity makes today’s politics far worse than they would otherwise be.

The aspect of his degeneracy that most struck me once again in his appearance last night is this:

Trump admires dictators.

As he said to Musk,

“Elon, I know every one of them and I know them well. I know Putin, I know Xi, and Kim Jung Un. . . . They are at the top of their game. They’re tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious.”

And he went on to explain how well he got along with those vicious dictators. Vladimir Putin, who is right now conducting a brutal war of aggression that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives? “I got along with Putin very well, and he respected me.”

North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, who presides over the world’s most totalitarian hellscape: “You know, I got along with Kim Jung Un. We had dinner. We had . . . everything. He really liked me. And I got along with him really well. We had a good relationship.”

This isn’t realpolitik. It’s the public and unapologetic admiration of viciousness.

If one loves the United States of America and the principles on which it stands, one cannot but hate this.

In the 1850s, Stephen Douglas took a “don’t care” stance on the question of whether new territories or states would allow slavery. Douglas was a far superior man to Trump, and he thought an openly amoral position on slavery necessary to preserve the Union.

But Lincoln denounced Duglas’s stance unreservedly. The Founders, according to Lincoln, were willing to tolerate slavery where it existed. But they prohibited the spread of slavery into new territories, where it had not existed, and held out the prospect of slavery’s ultimate extinction. This resistance to slavery’s expansion and the prospect of its extinction were key to the moral grounding of the nation.

And so on October 7, 1858, in their debate at Galesburg, Illinois, Lincoln said of Douglas: 

He is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.

A week later, on October 15, at Alton, Illinois, Lincoln developed his argument further:

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Today it is Trump who is blowing out the moral lights around us.

This doesn’t mean that everyone who seeks to deny Trump another term as president needs to talk only about this aspect of Trumpism. Lincoln’s Republican party didn’t campaign exclusively on slavery, and it appealed to different constituencies with various policy proposals.

Kamala Harris should do the same. She and her fellow Democrats don’t have to spend every minute denouncing Trump or explaining how dangerous he is. In fact, as a tactical matter, they should probably spend much more time building up Harris and explaining her program than focusing on Trump; it’s not clear that there’s much more information to be imparted about Trump, whereas voters still have to get comfortable with the rather sudden prospect of a Harris presidency.

But still, beneath all the political maneuvering—which is important! — one can’t lose sight of the real issue: The fight for “the common right of humanity” against the old and awful doctrine that it is might that makes right.

The Bulwark