Listen To This Story

To begin with an understatement: I am not given to political optimism, especially not now. In this time of utter hopelessness, when the entire world seems to have been remade in the image of the most powerful and the most despicable individual since the 1930s fascists, and every day brings new reports of his malignant rule, I live in the same dread that most of you probably live in. 

Nothing seems to stop him, and all the protests in the nation and all the grassroots organizing and all the postcards and phone calls and all the legal maneuvers against him — however much I admire, commend, and even participate in many of those efforts — are not likely to have any effect other than psychologically therapeutic. As The Contrarian described our current state of affairs, we are in a “dumpster fire,” and the flames have consumed the country.

So I won’t cheerlead. I can’t say, and I don’t believe, that everything will turn out all right. Donald Trump and his Republican acolytes are ruthless. Democracy and law are nothing to them but hollow words. Congress has abdicated, and the Roberts Supreme Court is the greatest anti-democratic force in our history. It has shredded the Constitution, and there is no taping the strips back together. This is what political hell, not to mention authoritarianism, looks like. 

But for all the doom that hangs over us and rises within us, something has happened these past few weeks — something astonishing, something I never would have predicted — that provides the very first glimmer, faint perhaps — okay, faint surely, like a distant galaxy — of hope that the monster run amok may finally have met an immovable object, a force more potent than the hatred he foments.

He has met a sense of moral outrage.

The evidence is in recent polling — almost all of which is telling the exact same story. Trump is underwater. He is well underwater. He is drowning underwater. He is at sub-Joe Biden depths, and he is out of oxygen. 

As Simon Rosenberg compiled the data in his “Hopium Chronicles,” Trump’s favorable/unfavorable differential is  minus 13 in the respected Quinnipiac poll, the same minus 13 in the Ipsos/Reuters poll, minus 14 in the Civiqs poll, minus 14 in the Econ/YouGov poll, minus 16 in the CNN poll, minus 16 in the CBS poll and minus 18 in the AP/NORC poll. 

What is worse for Trump is that his numbers are falling quickly and significantly among the so-called new Trump “coalition” that the pundits love to extol. He is 38 points underwater among 18 to 29 year-olds, 30 points down among Hispanics, 57 points down among Blacks, and 29 points down among Independents. These are the cohorts of defectors that were supposed to insure MAGA against Democratic victories.

The numbers themselves, however, are not what is astonishing. Polls swing, even chronically stable Trump polls, and the apparent collapse may be temporary. The only numbers that matter to him are Republicans, and they are still securely, eternally, in his camp. Republicans control the conduct of the government, and new steroidal gerrymandering may well make it virtually impossible for them to lose even the House. 

Couple that with the fact that, for years, Trump’s floor — the concrete base that never sunk below 46 percent, no matter what crimes he committed or corruption he was engaged in or the charges of moral turpitude leveled against him — never budged. This is what made MAGA into a religion rather than a political movement. These were worshippers. 

People seem to care much less about policy now — or more accurately, the effect of policy on their lives — than about psychology, which is to say the stoking of attitudes toward which they are already predisposed… “Owning the libs” was (and is) much more important to Trump’s base than owning their own lives.

Now that number has budged, hovering between 40 and 41 percent approval in most polls, but plummeting as low as 37 percent in the latest Gallup poll. Seemingly most significant of all is that voters not only disapprove of Trump generally, meaning his demeanor; they also profess, at long last, to be disapproving of his policies. 

On every single policy issue polled — the economy generally; inflation; jobs; the Middle East; Ukraine; tariffs; his “Big Beautiful Bill,” which a near-majority of Americans believed would hurt them according to the CBS poll, and only 25 percent thought would help; and even, even, immigration — Trump was underwater.

This in itself would be good, very good news, except that policy, I believe, has ceased to matter much in our political ecology. This may be the single most important transformation of our politics over the last decade or so, and one that Trump has greatly helped fashion. 

Once upon a time, politics was nearly all policy: Who is likely to make my life better? But despite what the so-called political wisemen say, people seem to care much less about policy now — or more accurately, the effect of policy on their lives — than about psychology, which is to say the stoking of attitudes toward which they are already predisposed. 

Voters didn’t hate Biden because of inflation, which had already abated by election time last year. They hated him because of what he represented to them, especially a seeming disdain for the deep resentments of white males. 

Similarly, MAGA voters didn’t love Trump because he promised to solve inflation and the Ukraine-Russia hostilities on day one, but because he expressed and exuded their hostility to liberalism. The enemy of my enemy is my president. “Owning the libs” was (and is) much more important to Trump’s base than owning their own lives.

Daring To Think in Terms of Right and Wrong

But back to salvation. It isn’t what the numbers say that provides the glimmer of hope. It is what undergirds those numbers. 

What they seem to suggest is that for the very first time since Trump’s appearance on our political stage, there is a hint of moral revulsion, and from a group larger than the Democrats, who, after all, constitute only a third of our polity. 

Trump’s brand — and his popularity among his supporters — has been predicated less on his dismantling of democracy than on his dismantling of morality, which they perceived as an oppressive liberal set of beliefs designed to help everyone but white Christian males. 

Trump has always recognized, as I have said here repeatedly, the deepest flaws in the American character, and he has had a gift for nursing them. Channeling self-pity and grievance was his primary power.

But he understood, too, that morality, more than anything else, was both his nemesis and the nemesis of his supporters. 

America, falsely or not, was originally constructed on the moral idea of virtue. The Founding Fathers, whatever their own faults, didn’t rely entirely, or even chiefly, on institutional bulwarks to keep the nation democratic. They relied on moral bulwarks — on the decency of those in power and of those vesting power: us. 

This was explicit. In Federalist 57, James Madison asserted that the “aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” 

In their view, a Trump would never arise because virtue, personal and public, would prevent him from arising.

While we have been fortunate enough to be governed, by and large, by men and women of virtue in a virtuous society, the scamp, the rogue, the rascal, the moral bankrupt, the demagogue may very well draw on the defiant, angry, rebellious, resentful tendencies in the culture that chafed against virtue, and empower the citizens to destroy it. 

Well, they were wrong. In fact, it might have been the reverse. While we have been fortunate enough to be governed, by and large, by men and women of virtue in a virtuous society, the scamp, the rogue, the rascal, the moral bankrupt, the demagogue may very well draw on the defiant, angry, rebellious, resentful tendencies in the culture that chafed against virtue, and empower the citizens to destroy it. 

Such is our situation now, and I think it explains Trump’s ascendance just about as well as any single analysis can. 

MAGA’s real beef isn’t with liberalism and the people it thinks have contempt for them; it is with morality. Moreover, Trump escaped moral condemnation not only because his supporters didn’t believe in morality as traditionally practiced, but also because he knew that as a celebrity, he really didn’t define his persona, so much as it defined him. 

Devoid of morality, he skates from opprobrium because we expect turpitude from him, while for any other president his actions would be abhorrent. As the media treats him, this is just Trump being Trump. Thus has Trump been doubly protected from moral assaults.

We have so readily accepted how Trump has destroyed much of America — much of what we loved about America — that we have yet to come to terms with how he has destroyed the very foundation of modern society, which is morality. He had to. As Madison noted, he could not have come to power without doing so. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in The Atlantic in 1862, during the Civil War, and arguing for the immediate end of slavery, produced a manifesto that is as relevant today as it was then. Emerson said, “There can be no high civility without a deep morality.” And this: “The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. … Morality is the object of government.” 

He called this the “consolation on which we rest in the darkness of the future and the afflictions of today, that the world is moral, and does forever destroy what is not.” How very badly we need that consolation now.

That consolation, that morality, is the antidote to Donald Trump.

A Long Campaign To Wear Down Our Better Angels

Many years ago, when I embarked on my two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy, I was on a quest to determine why liberalism, which promulgated and promoted so many of the best values of this country, met its demise during Kennedy’s nearly 50-year Senate career. 

I came eventually to realize that the question I was asking was the wrong one. The real question, the better question, was why the liberal era had lasted as long as it had when, materially speaking, many Americans either felt, or were convinced to feel, that they no longer needed the benisons of liberalism. 

It lasted, I came to feel, because liberalism had an appeal that conservatism couldn’t possibly have: It had moral authority. While liberalism fought for workers’ rights, women’s rights, Black Americans’ rights, immigrants’ rights, gay rights, the welfare of the poor and the elderly and the marginalized, conservatism opposed all of these. 

And Americans knew it, felt it, and embraced their better angels, sometimes against their own prejudices and even their sense of self-interest. Many understood that there was no moral equivalence between liberalism and conservatism, no matter how much conservatives absurdly tried to equate their hostility to the vulnerable with the liberals’ compassion for them — understood, in fact, that conservative morality was an oxymoron. (That moral contortionist David Brooks recently had the temerity to compare corporate DEI programs intended to equalize the distance between minorities and the white majority to Donald Trump’s malicious manipulations.)

It took conservatives 50 years to strip liberalism of its moral authority — a success owing in large part to the fact that compassion, decency, and empathy are hard, very hard, while conservative values, particularly selfishness, are easy. 

Conservatives have even declared war on empathy — The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy are the titles of two best-sellers — framing it as another liberal trick to soften masculine brutishness, because empathy is typically directed at the vulnerable and not at the aggrieved white Christian males who think themselves no less deserving of our bleeding hearts. (Elon Musk called empathy the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”) Richard Nixon once pronounced approvingly that “people don’t want to be improved.” Leave it to Nixon to summarize the last 50 years of our politics in one line.

Morality’s Comeback

And yet — try as they might to end traditional, Golden Rule morality — conservatives, and even Donald Trump, have not managed to extinguish it completely. 

How do we know? We know because 5 million of you turned out on “No Kings Day” — not because you thought Trump’s tariffs were ridiculous or because inflation was rising once again, but because he is a walking moral vacuum who lives to hurt people. 

And how else do we know? We know because of those polling numbers. I am convinced that Trump is languishing now in those lower sea depths because more and more people — no, not Republicans, who it seems are collectively incorrigible — are morally repulsed by him and see that what he is doing is wrong. 

And they are revealing what is the real dichotomy in this country — not between Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, or the majority and the rich, or the educated and the uneducated, or the urban and rural, but between those who subscribe to right and those who subscribe to wrong. 

It bears repeating that when Trump and MAGA say they hate the “Lunatic Left,” this is what they really mean. They hate the morality of the left. In effect, they hate morality period.

But morality just might be making a comeback.

Here is how I read the polls:

Trump is losing support for his destruction of Medicaid because taking away people’s healthcare is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support on cutting Food Stamps because denying poor, malnourished children food is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support on his hacking away at medical research because depriving us of medical advances is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support on insisting climate change isn’t a real problem because ignoring global warming is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because terminating the Department of Education and the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Voice of America and other federal agencies that help Americans and American allies is wrong, and they know it.

He is losing support because his self-interested attacks on law firms and universities and independent media are wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because transferring FEMA to the states and refusing FEMA aid to blue states is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because firing federal workers on the false pretense that they are wasteful and fraudulent is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because giving aid to Israel while ignoring Palestinian starvation, and playing footsy with Vladimir Putin while giving and then withdrawing and then giving again and then withdrawing again aid to Ukraine is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because many Americans now realize how much USAID contributed to saving lives and he is wrong — dead wrong — to have killed it, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because vaccine denial is wrong and deadly measles outbreaks are unnecessary, and Americans know it.

He is losing support — and we haven’t even begun to make a dent in the list — because all his instincts, everything he does, is wrong. Everything. 

And people are beginning to notice, finally, and perhaps too late, that he is so thoroughly transactional that there is no morality in him whatsoever, no moral gene, and we miss it. We miss right and wrong. They are like old friends who went AWOL. And many of us want to welcome them back.

The most obvious and powerful example is on the issue on which Trump staked his last campaign and, in many ways, his entire presidency: immigration. 

Trump characteristically understood Americans’ deep antipathy to immigrants, never mind that we are a nation of immigrants. He knew that immigrant baiting was good politics. Just attach the word “illegal” to “immigrant,” and you have got a winning hand. 

And, truth be told, Americans didn’t seem too lathered about what Trump did to those immigrants — rounding them up in dragnets; snatching them from their families and their workplaces; inventing stories about their alleged criminal activities; beating them; detaining them in unsanitary, crowded, infested facilities, either here or in other countries. No one really cared. They had been dehumanized, scapegoated, which is what authoritarians inevitably do. And the dehumanization and scapegoating was indiscriminate.

A “U-turn,” the Brookings Institute called this new, sudden opposition. And one should emphasize that this opposition is not just about policy. It goes much deeper than that. These are moral positions — a moral reevaluation of hurting immigrants because it is wrong. If there is that glimmer of hope, here it is. 

Or so we thought.

But then we get these polling figures, and Trump’s signature issue may be signature in another way, and not, for him, a good one. In the CBS poll, a majority of Americans “disapprove” of Trump’s program to deport immigrants; 56 percent thought he was prioritizing people who were not dangerous criminals for deportation; 52 percent felt he was deporting more people than expected; and a whopping 58 percent disapproved of the way Trump was using detention facilities. 

In the CNN poll, 59 percent opposed non-criminal deportation and 57 percent opposed the construction of new detention facilities. 

Gallup had even worse news for Trump: Only 35 percent approved of his immigration policy generally. Moreover, 64 percent of Americans now believe that our welcoming of others is “essential to who we are as a nation.” 

A “U-turn,” the Brookings Institute called this new, sudden opposition. And one should emphasize that this opposition is not just about policy. It goes much deeper than that. These are moral positions — a moral reevaluation of hurting immigrants because it is wrong. If there is that glimmer of hope, here it is.

Nor, in any moral discourse on Donald Trump, should one forget his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, however much Trump might want us to. Whether Americans see the Epstein matter as a moral one or just one of politics cum sensationalist media is difficult to determine, even if, at its essence, it is profoundly moral: rich, powerful men taking advantage of underage women. 

In political terms it is playing out as a game of catch-me-if-you-can on both sides. In moral terms, Trump had bragged, as we all know, that he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote, which spoke to his own morality, or lack thereof, as well as that of his supporters. The question here should be whether he could conceivably have had sex with an underage girl, or at least endorse others doing so, and not lose a vote.

In the past, the answer would be foregone. Of course he could, and of course he wouldn’t. But here is that faint glimmer again. For the first time, Trump is being held slightly accountable — even morally accountable. I have little doubt that the repercussions will be small — that either he will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, who will fully “exonerate” him in exchange, or the Supreme Court will intervene on her behalf on appeal so that Trump won’t have to issue a pardon, or some other variation on that theme — and that MAGA will rejoice. 

And yet… and yet, he hasn’t shaken this quite as easily as his other offenses. The moral antidote is at work.

Kindness as a Superpower

Whether people want to be improved or not, Trump’s presidency proves that the country is in desperate need of a moral reckoning — a way back to the morality that prevailed before Nixon and Reagan and, of course, Trump. 

To show how thoroughly we have lost our way, I turn to the new movie Superman, which is the latest iteration of the superhero from Krypton with the red cape and blue tights. Though there have been attempts, most notably by other recent Superman films, to delve into the roiling depths of the character and to divine a man at war with himself, Superman has not typically been a controversial figure. He opposes villains — here his arch-nemesis Lex Luthor — and he saves the world from disaster. Quintessential superhero stuff.

Writer/director James Gunn has even gone on record saying that his Superman is no dark angel. He is a boy scout, sweet-tempered — he stoops to save a mutt while in the middle of a gargantuan battle — which Gunn has said is the whole point of the film: that “basic human kindness is a value, and it is something we have lost.”

On the face of it, there is nothing particularly radical or incendiary about that. But it turns out there is. Because Gunn has also said that his Superman is a classic immigrant story, and the combination of kindness with immigrant has sent the conservative MAGA universe into a frenzy. 

We all know that MAGA hates immigrants, but, though I have been saying it all along, they also hate kindness, which is to say that they hate traditional moral virtues. (Don’t ask how anyone can possibly hate basic human kindness. They inexplicably call it “woke.”)

Superman, as it turns out, is an odd film if also a pretty good one. It is odd because, for all the sweetness of its hero and his good intentions, the film is infused with a sense of cruelty — the idea that the villain isn’t at odds with the world but is an integral part of it. 

Lex Luthor is a billionaire tech genius — part Elon Musk — and a powerful political player who schemes to take over the entire American defense force — part Donald Trump. He is manipulative, self-serving, narcissistic, hubristic, and cruel — very, very cruel. At one point he casually shoots a Good Samaritan who had come to Superman’s aid. 

Like Musk and Trump he is also a spin master, turning the entire world against Superman. (There is even a subplot where Superman is trying to help a Ukraine-like country while Musk/Trump/Luthor has made a deal with a Russia-like country to be ceded a large portion of its enemy’s territory once it has been conquered.) The public falls for the lies. Superman gets booed in the film by the people he has spent his life saving.

The point is that, now, not even kindness in a hero who confesses self-doubt is universally accepted as a positive. That gutting of morality is largely Trump’s doing. 

This Superman film would not exist, would not make sense, had not Trump challenged the very idea of kindness, had he not made kindness “woke.”

But there is this point, too, and it is more important for our current crisis. Superman — despite the brickbats thrown at it by the right, despite its audacity to stand up for basic kindness, despite the fact that Gunn has told the naysayers “screw you” — has been a box office hit. 

For all the fraught politics within it and surrounding it, the audience knows for whom to root. The film appeals to them not because Lex Luthor is about to conquer the world but because Superman prevents him from doing so. 

And that is another glimmer of hope — another indicator that the power of morality can shrink the immoral power of Trump. Put simply, Superman wins because most of us know this: what his opponents promote is wrong.

May that revulsion become a moral revolution.

Adapted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.