BALANCED VIEWS

Trump’s cruelty not limited to sexist attacks on women Declaration’s ‘moral lights’ sorely needed in dark time

Maureen Dowd

So, with this latest toad jumping from our president’s mouth, is Donald Trump acting like a sexist pig or simply a pig? I proffer, a pig.

I have no doubt that he would attack a man’s appearance in the same breathtakingly below-thebelt way if he felt humiliated by that man and had the ammunition.

In his vile tweet about Mika Brzezinski, he called her crazy. He often tweets that women journalists — including me — are crazy. Yet in that same tweet, he called Joe Scarborough “psycho.” And he told the Russians in May that James Comey was “a nut job.”

Some, including Scarborough, think Trump goes after women harder. Certainly, it resonates more with women because of Trump’s history of sexist remarks. (He did once tell me, though, that he considered women “tougher” and that he related to them better.)

But as some women anchoring cable shows call for the women in the Trump administration to rise up in protest, I say: Let’s not narrow it to sexism.

It’s even more troubling than that. It’s cruelty on a Grand Guignol scale, both in Trump’s heartless tweets and in his mindless salesmanship of the Republicans’ heartless budget. When Trump called the House health care bill mean, he knows whereof he speaks. He’s the King of Mean. Pathetically, Trump mistakes cruelty for strength.

The 71-year-old president’s pathological inability to let go of slights; his strongman reflex to bite like a cornered animal, without regard for societal norms; his lack of self-awareness about the power he commands and the proportionality of his responses; his grotesque hunger for flattery; his Pravda partnership with David Pecker, the head honcho at The National Enquirer, which has been giving Trump the Il Duce treatment while sliming his political opponents, the “Morning Joe” anchors and Megyn Kelly — these are all matters that should alarm men and women equally.

Trump is isolated in the White House, out of his milieu, unable to shape the story, forced to interact with people he doesn’t own. Before he got to D.C., Trump was used to media that could be bought, sold and bartered with. He is not built for this hostile environment, and it shows in his deteriorating psychological state. Even though he’s in the safest space of all, he’s not in a safe space.

“He is mean to men as well as women,” says Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “When he was planning to run for president in 2014, he required males and females in his organization to get in shape, and back in the ’90s Donald would hand out tubes of Rogaine to male executives and say the worst thing in the world is for a male executive to go bald.”

I gave Trump the benefit of the doubt after his comment on Megyn Kelly about “blood coming out of her wherever” when he claimed he meant her nose. But later, a longtime Trump associate told me that Trump had practiced that line before he said it on CNN and that it was meant to evoke an image of Kelly as hormonal.

Of course, since Trump and some of those close to him have such an elastic relationship with the truth, and since some staffers have been known to feed journalists false details just to mess with them, you can never be sure of anything that comes out of this White House.

Except the cruelty.

Michael Gerson

At moments of institutional conflict and uncertainty, Americans naturally turn to the Constitution. But at times of anger, division and national selfdoubt, the best American leaders have helped us turn to a different document: the Declaration of Independence. That few seem to be doing so now is another sign that we lack real leaders.

The Declaration is an odd source of national pride since it can be properly read only in a spirit of humility. It refers to a transcendent order of justice and human dignity that existed prior to the nation — and that exposed the nation’s horrifying hypocrisies. (“How is it,” taunted Samuel Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”) “We hold these truths” makes us vulnerable to the judgment of those truths.

American independence, of course, was an act of defiance rooted in a long list of grievances. After the Declaration was signed, patriots drank to the toast: “Perpetual itching without the benefit of scratching to the enemies of America.”

But, as Abraham Lincoln noted, the Declaration could have established national independence without its second paragraph about the human rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal,’” Lincoln argued, “was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain.” As he saw it, the Founders, while constrained by the political realities of their time, set out a non-arbitrary, timeless truth “for future use.”

“They meant simply to declare the right,” said Lincoln, “so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

Why is that maxim so important? At one level, Lincoln’s answer was bluntly practical. If liberty is denied to anyone, it could eventually be denied to you.

But Lincoln also saw the Declaration as the embodiment of a moral ideal. “It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

By definition, America can’t be a normal nation. Its greatness is a greatness of spirit. And its failures — such as slavery, segregation and the shameful treatment of Native Americans — are not only legal but spiritual failures. They are blasphemy against our country’s creed. Does anyone think or talk like this now? They need to.

How do we measure our loss? It might be a useful exercise to take political arguments and apply the Declaration as a kind of suffix. So: We should fear migrants as gang members and murderers ... and all men and women are created equal. Or: Muslims are a threat and should be kept out ... and all men and women are created equal. Or: Spending on AIDS treatments for foreigners is a waste ... and all men and women are created equal. Or: The human cost of a failing health or education system doesn’t matter ... and all men and women are created equal.

When our founding ideals are forgotten, it is the vulnerable and powerless who suffer first and worst. Lincoln accused politicians who dismiss or downplay the Declaration of “blowing out the moral lights around us.” When someone calls us back to that faded document, and begins to rekindle America’s conscience, it will be a sign we have found a real leader again.