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PRESENT DAY 52: Does Donald Trump Have a Soul
I’ve often tweeted that “there is no good in Trump” and that “everything Trump says is a lie.” These are my options, of course, but they’re opinions based on objective observation of Trump behavior and not just over the past eight years as we’ve all been subjected to his ignorant, malicious, self-absorbed narcissism. Unfortunately, my history with the Trump persona goes back much further. I was in New York back in the early 80s when his casino bankruptcies were in the news along with all of the commotion about bailing him out. To me at the time it was just another bad investment story and I paid little attention to it. But I was still in New York in the late 80s when Trump’s toxic racism became front page news when he himself took out that ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five teenagers who had been browbeaten by NYC cops into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Even if you believed them to be guilty, spending that kind of money and using publicity in that way made only one thing obvious: Trump was filled with racist rage and hatred but again I didn’t pay much attention once the case had slipped into the past. At some point in the 90s after seeing his attention seeking, often adulterous behavior highlighted on Page Six of of the New York Post once too often, I vowed never to read another word about Trump or to waste once more ounce of mental energy on him. But Trump racism and hatred continued to make news as he vilified Obama with the fake “birtherism” story and helped that toxic fiction take hold of the like-hate filled minds of people such as Sheriff Joe and Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Miller, Sarah Huckabee, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, William Barr, all of those now indicted in Georgia / in jail for attempting a coup for Trump on Jan. 6 and many more malicious characters that were about to be foisted on us at the end of Obama’s eight years. With Trump in the White House and having a direct impact on our lives, it was impossible to ignore him. It was obvious from the start that Trump was anti-America, anti-democracy and against all traditional American values. We knew we had to resist it in any way we could and so in spite of my vow, we made sure to post at least one anti-Trump cartoon every day while he was “in office.” I put those words in quotes because Trump never worked for the American people. We worked only for himself, if you can call scheming and scamming “work.” The lies came fast and furious. You couldn’t keep up with them. It was obvious to anyone who looked that there was no truth in Trump. Everything he said was a lie because everything he said, whether factually accurate or not, was said for the sole purpose of benefitting himself at a time when he was supposed to be representing all of us and trying to make the country and the world a better place for all. Such ideas never crossed Trump’s mind. But it’s not just honesty that Trump is entirely lacking. He also lacks the other human virtue - compassion. He demonstrated this time and time again, expressions his hatred toward many groups of people and cozying up with Nazis and white Christian nationalists, both of whose ideologies are founded on hatred and racism. This is fact, not opinion. I believe that there are only two human virtues - honesty and compassion. Trump is devoid of both. That makes him evil in the same way that Hitler was evil. Today Trump is vowing to commit the crimes against humanity that Hitler committed and he has the full backing of the Republican Party. People like Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Greene, Andy Biggs, Bill Barr, Jeff Clark, Elise Stefanik, Don Jr., Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lara Trump - the list goes on and on - are Trump fascists dedicated to the overthrow of American democracy. They’ve chosen to lead them in this treasonous effort a man devoid of humanity and virtue because only such a man would do it, would even be capable of doing it. Trump’s capable of doing it because he is shameless, shame being a form of honesty, a virtue that, as just stated, Trump lacks. Feeling shame requires the admission, even if just to yourself, of wrong doing. Trump is incapable of such admissions, such honesty, and thus incapable of feeling shame. (Include guilt in this.). So the question remains: if Trump is devoid of virtue, i.e., evil, does he have a soul? If you’ve read previous chapters on faith based delusions, you can probably guess where I stand on this question. But I’m no atheist. To me whether or not there is a spiritual reality is an open question. And I don’t rule out the possibility of discovering evidence of such a reality. I just haven’t seen it yet. You certainly won’t find it in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or any of the many other popular self help books on the market. You won’t hear it from anyone claiming to know it and the last place you’ll find it is in organized religion, which is, after all, just politics and politics with obvious authoritarian inclinations. So I don’t rule out the possibility that humans have souls. If we do and they are “immortal,” then it seems unlikely to me that they came into existence at birth, conception or any other “time.” Immortal to me means just that, existing for all time, existing beyond time or our idea of time. So I’d say that Trump probably has whatever everyone else has by way of a “soul.” The troubling question is how someone with human attributes can be so completely devoid of virtue. No doubt there are psychological explanations that may appeal to some regarding insecurities and so forth. These don’t satisfy me. I’d say there’s some depravity in Trump that goes beyond the usual personality failures. If being human and having a soul means having the ability to do good, then for all intents and purposes Trump has no soul. That’s an opinion, of course, but do anyone’s actions speak louder than Trump’s? Maybe it’s more than opinion. Maybe it’s objective fact.