Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

Everyone believes they’re essentially a good human being.

We all tell ourselves a story, and in that story our cause is always just, our motives are always pure, our side eternally the right one.

We’ve all spent a lifetime learning how to defend ourselves against criticism, even when that criticism is justified; in those rare moments when even we begin to wonder if we’re not who we say we are. We can gaslight the world and even ourselves, when necessary. The assumption of our own goodness protects us from accountability for thoughts and words and actions that are neither noble nor decent nor redemptive.

I don’t believe any good people still support Donald Trump or will be voting for him again—or they are in complete and active rebellion against any goodness they do possess.

I believe partnership with him is fundamentally antithetical to anything good, and here are a few examples.

Good people don’t align with a rapist and sexual predator.

Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and that is a matter of fact established in a court of law by a jury of Americans who declared him liable. He was also found to have repeatedly defamed Carroll for years, adding public insult to her private injuries. Add that, to the two dozen-plus previous accusations of sexual assault or misconduct by other women, his connections to known human-trafficker Jefferey Epstein, as well as Trump’s own misogynistic statements (not to mention his continually preening about taking away the body autonomy of hundreds of millions of women here)—and what you have, objectively speaking, is a man who treats women as things, not people, whose consent and humiliation mean nothing. In what universe is goodness compatible with such dehumanization?

Good people don’t enable a traitorous insurrectionist.

This one should be the deal-breaker of all deal-breakers for any human being who claims to love America or honor the rule of law. January 6th was a live, televised act of terrorism on our Capitol, now repeatedly and inarguably proven to have been planned, prepared for, aided by, and later defended by Donald Trump and his surrogates and coconspirators in Congress.

Trump is no longer denying his efforts to overturn a free and fair election that he has admitted he lost, or to have incited his followers to forcefully disrupt the certification of the people’s votes while he installed himself as dictator—but instead, has received from his purchased Supreme Court the unprecedented permission to make himself immune from prosecution. What people of any kind of goodness living here are willing to set this all aside for a political win?

Good people don’t abide the demonizing of legal immigrants.

Donald Trump’s continual doubling down on a proven false story of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio (one created by his own running mate, J.D. Vance), shows his willingness to traffic in targeted and reckless lies—all in the service of exploiting the racism of his white base.

Trump has recently said that he would deport all the Haitians in Springfield, even while being reminded that they are there legally. And just this week while responding in a Univision Town Hall, he again floated the “eating pets” untruths. Trump has also promised the “bloody” mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, without supplying any standard or system by which due process would be allowed anyone. What goodness partners with this?

Good people don’t stand for the exploitation of suffering Americans.

Here in North Carolina, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the greatest natural disaster recorded in the western part of our state, Donald Trump came in for a brazen, self-serving photo-op, while hundreds of people were missing, with bodies still in the surrounding water—all to launch baseless attacks on President Biden, Vice President Harris, and FEMA. This, despite repeatedly rebuttals from state and local officials who praised the Federal response to the tragedy (a response that Trump’s own Project 2025 would all-but eliminate, by the way).

Trump’s relentless and irresponsible lies, caused NC Governor Roy Cooper to take to social media to condemn them. Worse, recovery efforts here were interrupted by waves of armed militia in the already-ravaged area who came “hunting FEMA,” because they took his intentionally destructive word as truth. North Carolina residents or not, how can any decent human being stand with a a former president who would come to a mass grave, and the site of unthinkable human suffering—and lie without compassion or conscience.

Good people don’t support the whitewashing of American History.

This week, Donald Trump told Fox News that as President, he would defund public schools that teach about slavery in America. Hear what is being said, here: He is declaring that he would wield the power of the highest office in the nation, to scrub from our collective story, any content that he and those around him deem problematic, upsetting, or that disrupts the Great White Hero narrative they want to tell here.

How can any member of this nation who believes in equality in matters of race, gender, and sexuality, and who understands the bloody, horrific path we have walked as a nation to give all human beings the human and civil rights they deserve, advocate for erasing that story? No good human beings would consent to this.

And those are just a few recent examples of a vast and detailed, decade long resume of hatred and lies and vulgarity and criminality and cruelty that is unrivaled in our nation’s history, and secondary to only a few in our planet’s.

And that’s to say nothing of his alarming physical and mental decline which is now unavoidable and undeniable.

There are only two justifications for remaining emotionally tethered to Donald Trump at this point: ignorance or evil.

To witness everything you’ve witnessed over the past ten years;

• every documented lie,
• every manufactured emergency,
• every incoherent, all-caps tweet-tantrum,
• every horribly mismanaged national tragedy,
• every failed chance to be a calming presence and choosing instead to escalate enmity,
• every absolute refusal to be an agent of unity or healing or equity—and to still choose him is a declaration of your heart. It is a referendum on your decency.

As a Christian, I grew up with the teachings of Jesus, and he spoke clearly about what goodness looks like: it looks like the words you say and the things you’ve done. More than anything you may think you believe, it is the kinds of words that overflow from the source of your hidden heart, and it is the tangible fruit of the works of your life.

Goodness is not a matter how good you imagine you are.

It is not a matter of what you claim to believe.

It is not something you possess simply because you desire to possess it.

Goodness, is determined by the way you move through this world: a world that is either more or less loving and compassionate and equitable and kind because of your presence and your decisions.

Still supporting Donald Trump is an act of violence against vulnerable people.

It is an affirmation of white supremacy.

It is a celebration of cruelty.

It is a reiteration of homophobia and transphobia and nationalism and anti-Semitism.

It is a ratification of domestic terrorism.

It is a blessing of bigotry.

It is an embracing of inhumanity.

No, he is not a good human being in any way such things are objectively measured.

And good people don’t align with this, no matter what story they tell themselves.

They just don’t.