Trump mugshot from Fulton County, Georgia
Trump mugshot from Fulton County, Georgia
When sexual assault, Hitler aspirations and open treason aren't deal-breakers to Americans anymore we have more than a small problem.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
Rational human beings are supposed to have a bottom: a base level of decency that defines us, a place we will not go, because to go there would mean abandoning the very moral givens that tether us to one another and slipping into inhumanity.
We are expected as participants in community to have some ethical boundaries that hedge us in and prevent the very worst of our tendencies from festering to the point they metastasize within us and then among us.
We live in this world every day, alongside countless people in our homes and our neighborhoods and our workplaces and our travels, with the assumption that most of them still operate under those fixed and fundamental rules of human conduct: of goodness, lawfulness, truth, compassion. This assumption allows us to enjoy a daily existence without fearing that we are in imminent danger in another’s person’s presence, that we are safe to live in close proximity to them.
There are supposed to be rules humans abide by that declare that we are human and that we recognize and honor that humanity in others.
A sadly sizable portion of our nation have decided that they are not bound by such rules anymore. Donald Trump has somehow managed to transform tens of millions of once reasonable people into unprincipled cultists.
Admiring Hitler used to be a moral deal-breaker for decent human beings.
For a nation that spent the first two hundred and forty or or so years of its young life passionately fighting fascism at home and around the world, the idea of any politician, let alone a possible president emulating or aspiring to one of the most despicable and violent monsters in the history of the planet would be unthinkable. And yet, tens of millions of professed patriotic Americans now adorn their lawns with his name and pledge their undying allegiance to him, despite him invoking Hitler’s leadership, coveting his murderous generals, copying his violent playbook, and promising to be a dictator one day one. With a similar servile cadre of ghouls surrounding him and a campaign defined by the same dehumanization and racist dog whistles that visited Germany in the 1930’s, watching our family members, friends, and neighbors double-down on him is simply beyond comprehension.
There was a time when rape disqualified a person from the votes of men and women with a conscience.
Not only do we have an adjudicated sexual abuser as the Republican presidential nominee, but on the cusp of assuming the highest seat of power in our nation, garnering the steadfast support of fathers and aunts and grandparents and mothers of America’s girls and young women. Dozens of credible accusations of sexual assault and abuse should and would have killed any other campaign on arrival, but somehow these survivors and the possible hundreds they represent, have all become the acceptable collateral damage of Supreme Court seats and anti-abortion legislation, allowing people to accept what used to be patently unacceptable. His proven disregard for and violence against women is simply not a liability to his supporters. Just how does someone reconcile this in their heads and how little moral conviction must one have to abide a rapist as their leader?
I can remember when treason and insurrection weren’t something a self-respecting American would stand for.
I thought for sure the horrors at the Capitol on January 6th would be a deal-breaker for even the most devoted of his sycophantic foot soldiers; that watching a Capitol police officer brutally beaten on the steps of Congress with flags bearing his name would have fully sickened them to the point of defection. That this traitorous event has become instead, a place for his cultists to once again declare their undying allegiance to this man and to his movement, and to an ugly, lumbering, violent march toward an ever-deepening bottom is one of the absolute most tragic realities of my lifetime.
Back at a campaign stop in January of 2016, Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
It’s probably the last truthful thing he said.
Donald Trump’s voting base has jettisoned all the former barriers that once defined good human beings and responsible Americans. There is no regard for the law, no moral standard, no spiritual conviction left—there is only the steady, strident undying support that tells us they are slipping deeper into the void, one we must pull ourselves from falling into with them.
I don’t require other people to agree with me on all matters of policy, to perfectly mirror my preferences, to ratify my every conviction. I don’t require full agreement with regard to theological or political worldview—but I demand a base-level of morality in order to be in relationship with them and these people are not ready to consent to that.
I want to believe in the goodness of all people, but right now I’ll have to settle for the goodness of enough people who will simply outvote those who have decided that goodness is no longer necessary.
When some declare that no line is too far to cross—the rest of us will be here to defend that line together.
Our shared humanity deserves it.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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