Empathy for the cruel
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The American story has always been a contest between its highest ideals and its darkest impulses. At the moral zenith of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, he offered a vision that was as radical as it was redemptive: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
It was not a sentiment born of comfort.
It was forged in carnage.
It was an act of defiance against vengeance. It was a declaration that the Republic would not become what it had fought.
That moral inheritance has now been squandered.
What we are witnessing is not merely political decline. It is civic decomposition.
The descent from Lincoln’s appeal to our better angels to the spectacle described by Scott Bessent yesterday during an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” is not a straight line.
It is a collapse.
A surrender.
A moral abdication so complete that it demands to be named plainly: the rot is no longer at the edges. It is at the core.
Here is what Bessent said:
In the aftermath of the death of Robert Mueller, a man who embodied a life of service, discipline, and duty to country, we are told that the appropriate response to a president celebrating his death is not condemnation, not shame, not even silence, but empathy for the family of the man doing the celebrating.
Let that sink in.
Empathy, we are instructed, should not be directed toward the life of service, nor the dignity of the dead, nor the principle that some things in public life are sacred and beyond desecration.
No.
The appeal is inverted.
Twisted.
Perverted.
Empathy is demanded for the source of the cruelty itself.
This is not conservatism. It is not populism. It is not even politics. It is the normalization of moral inversion.
When Lincoln spoke of “charity for all,” he did not mean indulgence for the powerful when they degrade the country. He did not mean absolution for cruelty.
He meant grace in victory, restraint in power, and humility in the exercise of authority.
He meant that, even in triumph, Americans would remain bound to one another by a shared sense of decency.
What we are seeing now is the annihilation of that idea.
The defense offered by Bessent on “Meet the Press” is not a misunderstanding. It is a rationalization.
It is the language of enablers who have decided that proximity to power matters more than fidelity to principle.
It is the vocabulary of a political culture that no longer distinguishes between strength and cruelty, between loyalty and submission, between empathy and excuse-making.
There is something profoundly revealing in the instinct to protect the feelings of the Trump family in this moment. It reveals a hierarchy of concern that places the sensitivities of the powerful above the dignity of the dead, above the expectations of the living, and above the moral health of the nation itself.
This is how republics fail. It doesn’t happen in a single moment of catastrophe, but in a thousand small surrenders.
In each instance where truth is bent.
In each defense of the indefensible.
In each shrug where there should be outrage.
The journey from Lincoln to this moment is not measured in years. It is measured in compromises. It is marked by the quiet decisions of individuals who knew better, and chose otherwise.
History is watching. It always is.
It will record, with unforgiving clarity, who stood for something enduring, and who explained it away.
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Empathy is demanded by Bessent for the man who has empathy for no one!!!! He talks about the warranted search of Mar-a-Lago as if it were a devastating blow to an honorable man, forgetting to mention the thousands of government documents, some highly classified, that Trump illegally took with him and carelessly stored at Mar-a-Lago when he left the WH.
Will this insanity ever end? The self-righteous look on Bessent's face as he excused Trump's disgusting pleasure at a truly honorable man's death chilled my blood. Lest we forget, Mueller said there was not enough evidence to exonerate or indict Trump and this was enough for the evil and menacing megalomaniac in the WH to celebrate his death.
If America accepts this, we have lost our soul.
The other part of Lincoln’s statement is “with malice toward none.”
In the South we have Senator Katie Britt who only recently realized that ICE thugs abusing children was a bad thing. Or Senator Tommy Tuberville demonizing people of the Muslim faith who are Americans. Or Senator Marsha Blackburn, who opposed The Violence Against Women Act because it included protections for gay women.
I think it is entirely justified to have malice when the above is considered.