Death of the Heart

Former FBI director and special counsel, Robert Mueller died at the age of 81. In response, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social:

The post has ignited a firestorm. Trump spewed venom in response to the death of someone widely considered a patriot when he could have easily remained silent.

Basic decency dictates that one should know better: that home training would tell him to keep his mouth shut. But Donald Trump has demonstrated repeatedly his narcissism. That his character has been malformed and the only thing that matters to him is what he feels and what he wants. His is a kind of selfishness that is all consuming. Even grief has no quarter to breathe.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Over and over again, the president of the United States has revealed himself to be an amoral troglodyte. And no matter the poll numbers that suggest most of the American people disagree with his policy positions on the Iran war, on immigration, and his ongoing destruction of the economy, we all remain, whether we agree with it or not, awash in his deadly assault on the heart of the nation.

One doesn’t have to believe in the fantasy of American innocence or in an American Eden to feel the effects of Trump’s moral depravity. He is a product of this place, a concentrated version of its jingoism, its greed, and selfishness. Trump works as an accelerant in a diseased body. His presence makes the ugliness in our national bloodstream felt and known. Moral lethargy. A signal of the assault on the internal organs of the country. A sense of an inevitable end.

We know, if our eyes are open, what we see. Trumpism has attacked the basic institutions of our democracy. What Steven Bannon described as “the destruction of the administrative state” has extended beyond the adolescent and self-serving work of DOGE. Department of State gutted. Department of Justice corrupted. Department of Education disappeared. Congress dysfunctional. The Supreme Court captured. Oligarchs gobbling up the fourth estate and its adjacent platforms while the war machine rages on, and the super-rich keep getting richer.

But what Donald Trump and his supporters are doing cuts deeper than politics and political institutions. They have released a plague on the land—with fear, immorality, and indifference as its contagion.

Its aim, and I can think of no other way to say this, is the death of the heart: to empty us of any moral concern, to make of human freedom what we have made of the so-called choice between hundreds of channels of entertaining banality that dim the senses. To make us moral monsters.

Donald Trump’s post about Robert Mueller crystallizes the depth of the moral crisis that engulfs the country in its 250^th year. The President of the United States responded to the death of another human being who dedicated his life to the idea of America with the words, “Good. I’m glad he is dead.” And we should note those who liked the post, who “retruthed” it, who nodded their heads in the quiet isolation of their homes.

I am reminded of Matthew 13:15: For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.

Resistance demands more than voting for Democrats in the midterm, although we must do that. This moral assault requires, in addition to politics, a moral defense of the heart—to open our eyes, to see and feel, and to fight for the humanity that struggles to breathe.