Trump's "depraved cruelty"

Thinking about cruelty is hard for most people because visiting the darkness is always unsettling. It is not a place where most people choose to linger. Yet, the darkness must be contemplated, studied and recognized because when it encroaches on the light it must be recognized plainly for what it is and what it can mean. The spread of evil is always cloaked because facing obvious truths is difficult when pretending is so much easier. Denying evil and all of its attendants like cruelty, fear, hate, and ignorance is natural because human beings turn from what frightens them, and within every human heart there is a space that can be filled with love or hate, kindness or depravity. Each of us knows this deep down. We know that walking among us are monsters, murderers, rapists, abusers, torturers, criminals of all types and stripes. We read about their actions in our news feeds and are repulsed, frightened and relieved that the darkness fell somewhere else — somewhere beyond the light we stand in. Sometimes, the darkness feels close, very close. We all know that feeling.

It is good to talk about joy, but cruelty must be faced to be overcome and defeated. It never acquiesces on its own accord. Cruelty must be opposed and confronted.

A great deal of the analysis around Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris missed the point entirely. Most pundits and their cable news interlocutors seemed to evaluate the efficacy of the endorsement around how many undecided voters would be swayed by it, which is utterly irrelevant.

What matters around Liz Cheney’s endorsement isn’t the political impact, but the moral force of the argument that has forged a political coalition big enough to include Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney. What could possibly be so powerful and so unifying that it could conceivably accommodate such divergences in opinion? What cause could be so great and important that people who see the world so differently and disagree on so much could be so united on something so fundamental? What is it that they share that we all share and our descendants will all share?

The answer, of course, is the most noble experiment in the history of human civilization regarding the most elemental concepts of our shared humanity and spirit. What are those concepts? Here is our shared creed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Donald Trump does not share this faith, and his political movement teems with violence, hate, menace and cruelty.

Here is what Liz Cheney said about cruelty, and it should be deeply contemplated because the darkness is at all of our doors:

I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump, and I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president.

Everything can fall apart and slip away. It has before, just not here.

This week, Jews around the world are celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the new year, after a year of great sadness, testing and threat. Perhaps that is why I was reminded of the story of a young American far from home in a dangerous place thrust into a position he could never have imagined, armed with only decency and the strength of patriotism. When faced with evil and cruelty, Master Sergeant Rodney Edmonds chose the light. He reached for his faith, and he found his flag. His moment of supreme testing defines what it means to be an American and stand against the cruelty alone and unafraid. Understanding Liz Cheney is not possible without some knowledge of what it is that she actually represents. Her courage does not exist in isolation, but rather as part of a continuum that has never wavered in defense of what matters most, and has sustained the republic through its longest and darkest nights when all seemed lost.

Trump represents darkness and a pathway to national obliteration. His words are a summons towards disaster and an abyss that leads to unfathomable destruction. They should not be discounted or dismissed. Rather, they should be carefully appraised and understood.

The language Trump is using is the language of Adolf Hitler. Please understand what this Trump quote means as a declaration when referring to undocumented immigrants:

They're poisoning the blood of our country. All over the world they are pouring into our country.

It is a declaration of repudiation against America and the ideals of a nation founded on an idea.

The imperfections of America have always been most glaring where the lofty ideals of freedom are contradicted by long legacies of injustice and oppression. Yet, there seems to be an overwhelming gravity that has pulled America towards the ideals and away from the contradictions over time. Freedom and equality have come to mean freedom and equality for everyone in America in form, if not yet fully in practice.  

Trumpism has become a revanchist philosophy. It is radical, and simultaneously reactionary, teeming with menace, hostility and contempt for pluralism and democracy. Remarkably, it has succeeded in destroying the faithfulness of the third oldest political party in the world towards the oldest constitution in the world, as well as the elections created as a result of the American revolution with barely a peep of protest. What is remarkable about the event when considered through the prism of a coup d’état is the total silence of response. The capitulation occurred with barely a squeak. In fact, the hypocrisy which was once denied, then flaunted and celebrated has become so banal that it can be all but ignored.

Donald Trump has long denigrated America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guardsmen. He has insulted their fallen, their wounded, their disabled and their surviving families. Trump has denigrated their honor, valor, service and sacrifice. He has desecrated their country and belittled their “last full measure of devotion.” Incredibly, he has assailed American POWs, who have endured the unthinkable all across the world as being cowards. The stench from his character assassination of John McCain and the 684 Vietnam War POWs will never lessen and always linger about his rancid legacy.

There can be little doubt that Trump would have despised an American soldier from the American south captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Roderick Edmonds from Knoxville, Tennessee, was captured by the Nazis five days after arriving in Belgium in December 1944 as part of a wave of replacement troops for the final push into Germany.

Incredibly, Master Sergeant Edmonds found himself at Stalag IX-B at the head of a formation of almost 1,300 American POWs, where he was the senior soldier. The 26-year-old Master Sergeant was in charge. There was not a single officer in the camp.

The Nazi commandant demanded that Sgt. Edmonds call the Jewish Americans forward and separate them out. The Nazi position was that they had impure blood and needed to be enslaved or incinerated. Coincidentally, all of this occurred on the same day that Soviet Red Army forces overran a series of concentration camps that beggared description called Auschwitz-Birkenau in Eastern Poland outside of Krakow.

Sgt. Edmonds refused.

The Nazi commandant held a gun to his head.

Sgt. Edmond did not blink. He refused.

He said that they were all Jews. He then invited the Nazi officer to execute all of them as Jews and become a war criminal who would be hunted down when the war was lost.

The Nazi commandant walked away.

There were more than 300 American Jews in the prisoner ranks. They were not betrayed.

E Pluribus Unum.

Roderick Edmonds came home from the war and never said a word about any of this to anyone before he died in 1985.

His secret did not hold.

Today, he is remembered as “righteous among the nations,” and is a recipient of his nation’s gratitude and esteem because he was an American hero grounded in Americanism.

Americanism must be defended by all of us who treasure liberty, freedom and justice. Each are different things and none can exist without the other. They are all threatened.

When a former president of the United States decides to embrace the concepts, creeds, theories and ideas of Adolf Hitler to rouse the emotions of his followers, it must be confronted relentlessly and factually.

Just because most political reporters don’t understand what they are looking at doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Ignorance is danger — not bliss — in this situation.

The skies are darkening, and there is trouble ahead. Americans do not run from trouble. They move towards it.

Everyone should remember Sergeant Edmonds with just over a month until the election.

Donald Trump has held and is holding a gun to America’s head. Liz Cheney has not blinked, she has not wavered, and she has not betrayed her country in favor of a political party long since corrupted by the taint of the man who successfully hijacked it with the complicity of its elected officials who stood for nothing, believed in nothing and capitulated without a peep.

Donald Trump has been the center of our national life for 10 long years, but somehow he remains the invisible man to most of America’s political media. It is as silly and banal as it is transactional and corrupt.

Liz Cheney sees Trump clearly. He is more than a buffoon. He is a profound threat because, though he is a clown, his genius is of the vicious variety.

When viscous clowns gain power their legacy is always easy to predict. Disaster. It’s what cruelty brings. Always.

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