The only thing “epic” about Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury war of choice against Iran is that it is both a military failure and an epic moral scandal.
The only “fury” about it ought to be the anger of the American people, and, indeed, the world, for his incompetent and foolish leadership.
But Trump’s war of choice against Iran was not the first, it was, instead, the second. Trump’s first war of choice was and is against the United States of America.
It’s true. As soon as he was sworn in again as President, Trump launched a war against his own country with two primary fronts.
The first front that continues today is his assault on the principles and institutions of American democracy.
Professor of History Timothy Snyder says Trump and those around him decided they would rule America rather than govern it, by “ending the republic.”
“To an uncanny degree,”he says, “what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent.”
Further, we know they are doing this by using a tactic common among autocrats of pretending to protect people’s freedoms while taking actions to limit or destroy them.
Thus, Trump says he wants to protect the integrity of elections while falsely claiming they are wrought with fraud and is trying to limit the way people can vote.
He accuses his political opponents of weaponizing the government against the people while appointing leaders of the justice department who will do whatever he tells them to do, including indicting people who’ve openly criticized him and firing U.S. attorneys who refuse to prosecute bogus charges against former government officials.
He has tried to turn ICE agents into his private police to patrol the streets of blue state cities in the name of bogus immigration enforcement.
Worst of all, he regularly attacks the rule of law by accusing judges who rule against his abuse of power of trying to dictate the law and undermine presidential authority.
The fact is, the evidence that Trump chose to go to war against America is both overwhelming and irrefutable, the first president ever to do so.
But it’s the second front of this war that I fear the most, the impact of Trump’s lack of moral character on the moral conscience of the nation.
I would argue that the person Donald Trump is constitutes all the evidence we need to see why his influence on our country represents a serious moral threat.
He lies, cheats, deceives, engages in graft, sells access to himself to the wealthy and powerful, and at the end of the day looks out only for himself.
If he were a private citizen we would write him off as man never to be trusted, but the fact that he is President of the United States means that on the basis of who he is, what kind of person he is, he can have a negative influence our nation’s commitment to the moral standards that have sustained us for 250 years. I would go further and say he is having that negative influence already.
This is not about what he is doing. It is about who he is, about the fact that when he speaks and acts he reveals a lack of moral conscience, moral code, and moral character as if a person’s conscience doesn’t matter, moral codes can be ignored, and valuing moral character is moralistic and even prudish.
Because his character is hopelessly flawed, moral indecency comes naturally to him, which means that just being himself represents a normalizing of moral rot, moral corruption.
Worse, the fact that 77 million Americans voted for him in 2024 suggests that he is having significant success. That’s what the 2024 vote tells us, that millions of Americans viewed Trump’s moral corruption as normal and perfectly acceptable to them for someone running for president.
That is incredibly revealing and disturbing, not only to all of us as Americans, but also to people around the world. On our trip to Ireland I met a woman who said she understood that Trump didn’t represent who all Americans are, but she said, “What I don’t understand is why 77 million [she actually used that number] Americans voted for him.”
I told her neither did I, but what I do know is that those votes were an alarm bell going off warning us of the moral slide we are experiencing as a nation.
When people claim they didn’t vote for what Trump is now doing, our reply should be: “Of course, you did, what did you expect? You knew exactly who he was and you voted for him anyway, and now you want us to believe you didn’t vote for what he’s doing.”
In November of 2024 Donald Trump was a convicted felon on 34 counts of fraud related to paying off a porn star he had sex with just after Barron was born so voters wouldn’t find out about it before the 2016 election, was also convicted of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, was forced to pay students for defrauding them at his now defunct Trump University, had to shut down his charity in New York because he used contributions for himself.
How much more did anyone need to know before his moral corruption mattered to them? What did those who chose to vote for him expect he would do if they elected him? Become a choir boy? Put their interests ahead of his own when he’s never done that before in his life? Tell them the truth when he’s never done that before either?
What we know he did do was to persuade enough people to believe his moral corruption was normal and acceptable to them that they elected him a second time to the nation’s highest office, the consequences of which we will be discovering for years to come.
So when anyone says that when they voted for Trump they didn’t vote for what he is doing, they are denying the truth that they knew exactly the kind of man he was and voted for him anyway and are now getting what common sense, if not their moral conscience, should have told them what would happen.
I believe our democracy is going to survive Trump’s war of choice on it, but I am not so sure about the moral principles that serve as the foundation for our life together as a people.
We see Trump’s success at normalizing moral corruption in the silence of Republicans in Congress who refuse to say or do anything to criticize or oppose him.
We see his success in the fact that we all know this level of moral corruption would have ended any and all presidencies in the past, yet Trump remains in office.
We see it in the inexplicable continued support of his political base of people who seem morally tone deaf and politically blind to what he is doing to undermine our nation.
The truth is, there are more than a few reasons to wonder if our country will survive the moral test Trump poses because of who he is.
Even if I believe, as I do, that we will defeat Trump politically and retain our democratic principles of self-governance, it’s America’s commitment to moral ideals and principles we need to be a good nation that worries me more.
Moral erosion works like a silent cancer that spreads before it is caught and then it is too late to do anything about it. When at least a third of the population has endorsed and still support Trump’s moral rot as if it’s normal, there is reason to be alarmed.
That is why it is not enough to fight Trump politically. We must fight him morally. We must stand up to him directly, and to those who support him, because his very being poses a real danger to the moral character of our nation.
If Trump represents us as a people, America is lost even if we keep our democracy, and Trump’s election in 2024 will be a mistake that will likely be repeated at some point in the future.
That’s why we must understand that his first war of choice was launched against both our political system AND our national character.
The lesson from Trump’s second presidency should already be obvious. The moral character of a president matters. It matters a lot. It may be the thing that matters most if we want presidents who honor their oath of office.
We are now far enough into Trump’s second term to know if his absence of moral character has convinced us of just how essential good character is to being President.
If it hasn’t, this 250th year of our nation’s founding might well mark the moment when we missed the chance to affirm the role morality plays in the maintenance of freedom and justice for all.
If it has, it will be a moment when we renew our commitment to being the kind of nation we have always aspired to be politically and morally.
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