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NOTE: If you are in the area of the book talk events on Evangelicalism and the Decline of American Politics listed below, I hope you will join me.
Monday, September 24, 7:00 p.m. – First Christian Church, Ames, IA
Tuesday, September 25, 7:00 p.m. – Ames Public Library
Tuesday, October 2, 7:00 p.m. – Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis
(I will also be speaking at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship congregation in St. Cloud Sunday morning, September 23, at 10:30, for their morning worship service.)

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“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”

Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.

I have believed for a long time that Donald Trump’s words and actions showed he had no moral compass at all, especially when he decided that abusing immigrant children was not only acceptable, but wouldn’t create the outrage it did.

But I confess I was truly unsettled when I read someone who works with him in the White House saying it.

This national nightmare is not going to end well for him and the country, but as I have said before it is going to end. Specifically, it is going to end on November 6th when sensible Americans defeat the Republican Congress as a statement to Trump that his presidency is over.

There will be no need to impeach him. He will not be able to cope with the exposure and ultimate rejection he will experience, leading him to resign or not seek re-election.

People who voted to put our nation in this crisis and those who supported him in spite of all the warning signs right up to the end will believe a grave injustice has been done to him.

No matter. As Lawrence O’Donnell has pointed out, when Joe McCarthy was being censored by the U.S. Senate back in the 50s, he still had a 38% approval rating.

Sometimes some people never see what is in front of them.

The rest of us will have to do the repair work to our nation’s character, moral foundations, and reputation in the world.

It is sad, at least for me, that the Christian community will play no significant role in the nation’s recovery from Donald Trump, what with evangelical support of him and a pervasive mainline church silence in the face of his amoral actions.

But the rest of the nation will do what it has to do to get back on its feet.

It will be hard work, and require careful thought and moral clarity.

Unfortunately the anonymous op-ed writer pointed us in the wrong direction when he said: “The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”

That kind of statement convolutes the place we will have to start in the Trump clean-up with the common false equivalency that everybody is at fault. After all, there has been incivility on both sides.

True as that may be, it highlights the wrong problem, and also relieves those responsible for the real problem from being accountable for their actions.

Trump has not stripped us of civility. That was happening before him because of the Republican tea party whose members hurled racial insults at the Obamas, worked to pass voting laws intended to put limits on minority voting rights, lied about threats to our nation, chose obstructionism over compromise, finally becoming formidable enough to produce moral cowardice among Republican members of the House and Senate.

Tragically Trump rode these despicable attitudes and actions to victory, thereby legitimizing them in the eyes of Republican voters. The result is that small mindedness, vindictiveness, name calling, racism, and plain old meanness by an American president has been normalized.

This is the real problem from which the nation must recover, without false humility couched in false equivalencies.

There can be no equivocation about who brought the nation to where we find ourselves today. It doesn’t make the rest of us perfect, or even good, but it does make us honest about the fact that Donald Trump, his base of voters, and a cowardly Republican Congress have sent our nation into a moral and political tailspin.

The fundamental safeguard we will need to ensure that someone like Trump never gets elected again is to tell the truth about what happened when he did.

If we have the moral sturdiness to do that, we will be able to move forward together.