The Moral Rot That Threatens America

By Roger Cohen

Opinion Columnist

May 18, 2018

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CreditMiranda Barnes for The New York Times

I asked a senior German diplomat the other day what issues the United States and Germany are cooperating on. He looked blank. Not Iran, obviously. Not trade, evidently. Not climate change, blatantly. Not Russia, plainly. Not migration, pointedly. With alliances like these, who needs enemies?

From a French diplomat, I received a worried letter. President Trump’s scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal was “the best illustration of the Jacksonian moment the United States is going through, a mix of unilateralism and isolationism” that contribute to “a new world disorder” where there is “no more American power willing or able — or both — to be the last-resort enforcer.” In the vacuum, he could discern “no minimum level of convergence between the key players.”

Trump to Europe: Get lost. As the French president, Emmanuel Macron, observed of Trump last month, “He is very predictable.” Boringly so, I’d add. His contempt for the Atlantic Alliance was evident during the campaign; he follows through. That’s his form of “honesty” amid a torrent of lies. Tens of millions of Americans love him for it. They see him as the most “honest” president ever.

Why? Because he tells it like it is.

Europe is beginning to digest the severity of the schism. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s senior foreign policy official, heaped scorn on Trump recently, saying that “screaming, shouting, insulting and bullying, systematically destroying and dismantling everything that is already in place, is the mood of our times.” Without naming the president, she warned that “this impulse to destroy” leads nowhere good. Hers was a requiem for “respect” and “dialogue” — in effect the post-1945 order.

I’ve always been a passionate Atlanticist because I believe institutionalizing the European-American bond that grew out of World War II is what saved my generation from the wars my father and uncle were summoned from distant South Africa to join. But the problem today runs deeper than Trump’s contempt for any multilateral order. That can be fixed, in time.

What eats at America — and so its place in the world — is moral rot: unrelenting blight that emanates from on high. When it comes to rottenness, Denmark is passé. Try the White House.

Just this month, an aide, Kelly Sadler, dismissed Senator John McCain because “he’s dying anyway.” She still has her job in the White House communications office, where she focuses on illegal immigration. Speaking of which, Trump alluded the other day to some immigrants as “animals” who “aren’t people.”

These are disgusting remarks, there’s no other adequate description.

McCain, battling brain cancer, is a war hero who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam; no bone-spur, war-evading rich Queens kid he. He emerged from captivity to become a stubborn advocate of American values as, overall, a force for good. His rejection of Gina Haspel, the new CIA director, because of “her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality” is what prompted Sadler’s dismissive foulness.

As for the president’s descent into the sewer where hatred and pogroms are fashioned, the United States is not a nation of animals. Immigrants, including Trump’s own German-born grandparents, made this nation distinct.

I’ve been reading “Our Towns” by James Fallows and Deborah Fallows, a tonic of a book about the can-do America unready to succumb to rot. In the many towns the couple visits, immigrants are working hard, enriching the social fabric, and creating wealth.

In a big slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls, S.D, new immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, Nepal and elsewhere “put the pigs to death and convert them into meat,” and then a Chinese company “ships much of the meat to customers who are rapidly moving up the protein chain in China.” This is the reality of an interconnected world that makes nonsense of Trump’s tinny obsession with “sovereignty.”

In Burlington, Vt., Hai Blu, from Burma, and his wife, True Tender, whom he met in a Thai refugee camp — surely the best-named couple in America — are making it. She’s training to be a nurse. He’s working at the Skinny Pancake. As the book illustrates, “Employers quickly come to appreciate the reliability, determination and work ethic of refugees.”

I’d suggest Trump read the book, but he doesn’t read. He traffics in slurs and untruths. The deepest form of rot is the erosion of the distinction between truth and falsehood. Totalitarianism was one big lie perpetrated on human beings reduced to the often hopeless quest for survival in a fog.

A universe where morality ceases is the one Trump is most comfortable in. “Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” Trump’s answer, on April 5: “No, no.” Except, as the president clarified in a recent financial disclosure, he did know.

This is Trump’s Ministry of Truth, the new American normal. It’s impossible to overstate the enormity of it. That’s why the Alliance is collapsing and Germany finds no basis for cooperation: Trump’s America stands for nothing. As Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, told recent graduates in a speech, going wobbly on the truth means “we go wobbly on America.”

There is only one core task before everyone in Trump’s America: Keeping the Republic, despite him.

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