The decency chasm

by David Benjamin

“Let us not assassinate this lad further. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
―Attorney Joseph N. Welch, Army-McCarthy hearings, 9 June 1954

PARIS—Donald Trump is an indecent man.

Worse than that—in the immortal formulation of Joe Welch, castigating Sen. Joseph McCarthy for gratuitously savaging the reputation of a young lawyer during the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings—Trump has no sense of decency.
He doesn’t know what it is, except in its obverse. He foments indecency. He wallows in it publicly, proudly and gloriously.

Trump stands apart from every president, and every aspirant to the office, in his indifference to even the appearance of decency. Even Richard Nixon, Trump’s forerunner in using the Oval Office as a criminal enterprise, gathered around himself the trappings of decency, flouting his wife’s “cloth coat” and his dog, Checkers. At his most indecent moment, Nixon recoiled. “I am not a crook,” he lied, thus confirming that he was a crook.

The irony, of course, is that decency is a commonplace. To be decent, to do unto others as one would have them do unto oneself, is a universal value. It is decent to admit one’s weaknesses, as did Jimmy Carter in the Playboy interview when he said he had “lusted in his heart.” It is decent to be humble when praised and to be quick to share credit. It is decent to depart high office with grace and dignity, as forty-five out of forty-six presidents have done.

Many presidents have been caught in indecencies. Our most notorious recent example is Bill Clinton’s infidelities, particularly his creepy tryst with Monica Lewinsky. But Clinton understood decency. Her knew that an imperfect man could commit an indecent act—commit a sin—and still live a decent life. Indeed, Clinton’s genuine power to “feel the pain” of others, to understand hardship and commiserate with the injured, the damaged, the poor and the mourners were hallmarks of his character and a wellspring of his popularity.

George W. Bush prosecuted a “war of choice” based on lies, resulting in thousands of deaths. But he also espoused a sincere Christianity that bespoke his desire to be honorable, respectable and solicitous of others. His efforts to solve the border crisis and fight the AIDS epidemic were milestones of decency.

Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, was ruthless and dogmatic, a Machiavellian puppeteer who stalked the West Wing like a malevolent hunchback. But the gesture that I remember, amidst all his dark intrigues, was the politically fatal embrace of his daughter Mary when she made it public that she’s a lesbian. Cheney supported Mary even against the wishes of other family members. In that moment, the merciless partisan proved himself—beneath his black and bloodstained armor—a loving dad, a decent guy.

Of the three most recent presidents, two have been among our most decent. The one between Barack Obama and Joe Biden was a layer of slime.

We are all familiar with Trump’s rap sheet. He has stolen his workers’ wages, defrauded his investors, ripped off thousands of customers and stiffed his creditors. There’s not a bank in the United States that will spare him a dime. He has not only cheated on his taxes and all three of his wives, he has done so openly, boastfully. He is a sexual predator, admittedly and—per the judgment of a New York jury and at least two judges— legally. He has frequently consorted with other sexual predators, particularly serial rapist and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, whom Trump called a “terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Mary Trump has said of her uncle that “for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people.” His current running mate, JD Vance, comparing Trump to the most evil sociopath of the twentieth century, called him “America’s Hitler. “ One of his most obsequious toadies, Sen. Lindsey Graham, has called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Despite his adulation by “Christian nationalists” (an oxymoron), Trump is the most godless human ever to aspire to public office in a democracy. The image that comes to my mind is that day in June 2020, just after Trump ordered the clearing of Black Lives Matter demonstrators with truncheons and tear gas. He shlepped, with a motley entourage of staff and dignitaries—few of whom knew where they were going, or why—to St. John’s Church. There he posed for a photo op, holding up a book he had never read, his ignorance of the Bible’s demonstrated by that very gesture of public display. For in Matthew, Chapter 6, Jesus says, “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ in front of others, to be seem by them … And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen … ”

Trump’s greatest production, the January 6 putsch, was a festival of indecency, when every tradition of our democracy—civility, discourse, decorum, non-violent disagreement—were trampled among the fallen cops and smeared with shit. January 6 was Trump’s apotheosis. He sat and watched it, pleased with himself, because it was the whirlwind he had wrought, the chaos of a corrupted mind made manifest in the madness of a crowd. It was, for Trump, a love-in.

In the current campaign, while Trump elicits nothing coherent in the way of policy, inciting fear and promising Apocalypse (with no knowledge of the word’s origin), his opponent, Kamala Harris, is plagued by demands for scads of policy, then faulted for an absence of “detail” on the myriad policies she has both articulated and published. Trump hates, among countless others whose number grows moment by moment, Haitians and Taylor Swift. He’s a beacon for bigots. He is not just indecent to the bone. It goes deeper and it spreads. He is contagiously indecent. Most of his believers, as they were growing up, were taught to be decent—kind generous and polite. Trump knows in his tiny heart of hearts that each person has an inner ugliness and he tears away until it is exposed. He exudes hatred. He sells hatred online, with his brand-name—in white capitals—on every item.

And then, there’s Kamala Harris, who doesn’t seem to hate anyone, even Trump. I mean. she shook his hand.

Who would want to touch him?

She did that because she’s decent, much the way I shake hands with a fairly smelly homeless guy when I give him a dollar and ask if he has a place to sleep. That is, she’s normal, trying to be good, caring because she ought to care, because she always has, because everybody should care. She might not be perfectly decent. There might be a mean bone in her body. (I kind of hope there is.)

The pundits and press will blather about “policy” until Election Day. But in this season more than ever before, policy is irrelevant. Donald Trump is a depraved and vacuous vulgarian campaigning to become the leader of the free world. He is Dorian Gray in orange greasepaint running against a woman with a moral code and compassionate demeanor recognizable to Americans as values we’ve associated with the presidency—with our greatest presidents—since George Washington.

This year, policy is not just hot air. It’s poison gas. It is a cynical diversion that serves to shield a criminal from the consequences of his iniquity. This election is only, solely, exclusively, about decency—which is the bare minimum.

Trump has none.