As Trump barrels forward dismembering and destroying long-held liberal American norms and democratic traditions and values that have been hard-fought for and legislated since the Civil War, it would be easy to become despondent and turn away from the political process. As a student of human nature, nothing that’s happening now really surprises me. Nor does anything Trump has done or will do mean that America is entering a long period of regression and the beginning of a generation of demagoguery. David French put it well last week on The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller that we still have agency to resist Trump’s demagoguery:

“The courage, compassion, and resistance against Trump combined with some of the natural consequences of Trump’s erratic and incompetent nature mean that there will be a real opportunity to turn the page from Trump. He will give us that opportunity. The question is will those who are opposed to Trump have our act together well enough to seize the opportunity… One of the things Trump has benefited from is sometimes a corrupt and incompetent opposition. … He’s at a high watermark now. Often there’s a period of extreme triumphalism after elections, but we’ve seen this flip-flop-flip-flop of power many times. The Trump folks are deluding themselves that they are on the ascendancy [that will last for decades].”

My sons often tell me that I’m a pie-in-the-sky idealist ignoring the corrupt reality into which America has been sliding. I understand their perspective and, in truth, agree that American society has massive problems. But, I believe that hope is very different from optimism. Hope is not an attitude that denies a very bad reality. I wrote about the difference between hope and optimism at some length in my Memoir (From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi – publ. 2024). There I argued:

“Hope keeps us grounded in the here and now as a commandment of the heart in the face of uncertainty, a vision that enables a better future, based on trust and supportive of purpose, enabling us to live in an enhanced present of constructive waiting. Our keeping focus on the kind of world we want to inhabit, while doing everything possible to prepare ourselves for the fulfillment of that vision and dream, inspires not only hope but renewed energy, a sense of purpose and an optimistic attitude. Each of us has the capacity to inspire hope through our deeds despite obstacles in our way. There are so many examples of how one individual changed the course of history. All great social movements started with an individual whose will and hope thrust him/her forward to do great deeds.”

I offer here, as well, a few words published last week by Psychology Professor Dr. Kendra Thomas (“Hope Is Not the Same as Optimism, a Psychologist Explains” (January 25, 2025):

“Long-term hope is not about looking on the bright side. It is a mindset that helps people endure challenges, tackle them head-on and keep their eyes on the goal… What makes hope a virtue is not its ability to promote happiness and success but its commitment to a greater good beyond the self. …[Hope is] an unwavering focus on striving for a better future, often unglued from expectations of personal success… Hope is not a positive expectation but a moral commitment. … Hope doesn’t expect a quick improvement, yet it wards off paralysis… Hope plays the long game: … it manifests in hardship and is refined in adversity. Hope enables communities to march for justice and democracy even while tasting the danger of dictatorship, apartheid or oligarchy.”

The Trump Administration buttressed by a sycophantic majority in Congress and a majority of state houses presents formidable obstacles to human rights, democracy, justice and the virtues of compassion and humility. Some of his excesses in Executive Orders, however, are beginning to be challenged by the courts and even by corporations (see Dan Rather’s Substack piece today – January 28), by Democrats in Congress, states, cities and neighborhoods. Political pundits and members of the Democratic Party are starting to think out loud about what went wrong in the 2024 elections and what must be done going forward politically before elections this year and in 2026.

Edmund Burke reminds that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” 

I’ve been baffled for years about why millions of Americans continue to support Donald Trump after his disastrous handling of the Covid epidemic, his 34 felony convictions, his 54 remaining indictments, his massive grift, his pathological lying, his central role in the only insurrection led by an American president against the United States government in our nation’s history, his 2 impeachments, his craven disrespect for soldiers and gold star families, his utter lack of virtue, his dark, dystopic, cynical, and pessimistic attitude about America, and his racism, misogyny and hatred against immigrants of color and anyone who critiques him.

Political thinkers, psychologists, constitutional scholars and lawyers, podcast and cable news commentators, and print journalists have offered all kinds of reasons for the fealty of so many millions of Americans who show ongoing support for arguably “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”  (General John Kelly – a 4-star general and one of Trump’s former Chiefs-of-staff).

Many of the reasons offered make some logical sense: he’s entertaining; his need for vengeance resonates with the life-experience of many of his fans who are angry like him and feel they’ve not benefited in the American dream; his role as a cult leader offers a sense of belonging for people on the margins of society; his tough-guy persona gives many a super-hero with whom to identify; the perception that he was good for the economy; the expansive reach of a myopic right-wing media bubble that reinforces his brand; the persuasive power of ‘don’t believe your eyes – believe me’ that enables people to stop thinking; the racism, misogyny and fear of the “other” many of his followers also feel; the support of evangelical Christians who like his right-wing judicial nominations and reversal of Roe v Wade; and the fact that there are so many life-long Republicans who just can’t imagine leaving their political and cultural “tribe” and supporting a Democrat.

All those reasons are compelling and likely true – but what else might be attracting some of Trump’s followers?

The renowned Swiss-Polish psychoanalyst and philosopher Alice Miller (1923-2010) may offer a measure of insight not only into Trump’s character, but the character of many of his followers. She wrote at length about why people and nations follow evil leaders in her two books: For Your Own Good – Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence and The Drama of the Gifted Child – The Search for the True Self.

In the Preface to For Your Own Good she explained:

“Since the end of World War II, I have been haunted by the question of what could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death and of how it could then be possible for millions of others to acclaim him and assist in carrying out this plan.”

Donald Trump is NOT Adolph Hitler and the MAGA right is not the Nazi party. However, Trump fits the profile of the leader that Dr. Miller described in her books.

She concluded that every act of cruelty, no matter how brutal and shocking, has traceable antecedents in its perpetrator’s past – most often from childhood. She cited and quoted from a mid-18^th century German book on child-rearing by Johann Georg Sulzer who, in 1748, wrote in “An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children”:

“Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey…. It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”

Sulzer continued:

“I advise all those whose concern is the education of children to make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness [in the child] and to persist until they have reached their goal… by scolding and the rod [for the purpose of creating] obedient, docile and good children [from as early as] the child’s first year.”

Dr. Miller opines:

“Neuroses and psychoses are not direct consequences of actual frustrations but the expression of repressed traumata…” [the child] “…will experience feelings of anxiety, shame, insecurity, and helplessness, which may soon be forgotten, especially when the child finds a victim of his/her own… A child’s ever-growing discomfort at the loss of the pleasure he/she would have had if the child’s wishes had been granted, eventually find satisfaction only in revenge, i.e. in the comforting knowledge that one’s peers have been subjected to the same feeling of discomfort or pain. The more often the child experiences the comforting feeling of revenge, the more this becomes a need, which seeks satisfaction at every idle moment. In this stage, the child uses unruly behavior to inflict every possible unpleasantness, every conceivable annoyance on others only for the sake of alleviating the pain the child feels because his/her wishes are not fulfilled. This fault leads with logical consistency to the next; his/her fear of punishment awakens the need to tell lies, to be devious and deceitful…”

Does this sound familiar when thinking of Trump?

Dr. Miller concludes:

“When still in diapers, the child learns to knock at the gates of love with ‘obedience,’ and unfortunately often does not unlearn this ever after… all the requirements will have been met to enable a citizen to live in a dictatorship without minding it; he or she will even be able to feel a euphoric identification with it… In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of the child’s upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His/her ‘will’ is completely identified with that of the government.”

The psychoanalytic principle of “identification with the aggressor” – a defense against an over-powering and threatening adversary – is helpful in understanding why many of those who identify with Trump find such comfort in their doing so. He presents himself as the ultimate alpha male aggressor. Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, has written that when Donald was a child, he was a thin-skinned playground bully.

Trump loves dictators – Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán – and calls them “strong” and “smart.” One of Trump’s ex-wives said that he kept Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bed’s night stand. Marine Gen. John Kelly and Trump’s former Chief-of-Staff said that, as President, Trump complemented Hitler saying that “he did some good things” seeming to ignore the millions the Nazis murdered and the 400,000 Americans who died in WWII.

Was Trump beaten into submission by his hard-driving father? It is unclear. However, in a NYT’s article (July 28, 2020), Trump’s father Fred was described as

“…a disciplinarian who spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing his son’s career and taught him to either dominate or submit. In Fred Trump’s world, showing sadness or hurt was a sign of weakness. ‘The only thing that Trump ever cared about was ‘I’ve got to win. Teach me how to win,’ George White, a former classmate of Mr. Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who spent years around both father and son, said in an interview. Recalling Fred’s hard-driving influence, Mr. White said that Mr. Trump’s former school mentor, a World War II combat veteran named Theodore Dobias, once told him that ‘he had never seen a cadet whose father was harder on him than his father was on Donald Trump.’”

Mary Trump has written that Donald “suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.” Perhaps many of his followers also suffered childhood deprivations that drew them to the former president.

It remains to be seen how many of the millions of Trump’s followers will vote for him again on November 5^th. It seems to me (anecdotally) that we are witnessing a significant enough abandonment of Trump by hundreds of former traditional Republican leaders from the Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. and Trump administrations who have come to the conclusion that Trump is corrupt and a significant security risk to the United States. As Kamala Harris has emerged as a strong, competent, experienced, and joyful Democratic standard bearer, the Cheney family and so many others recognize that she (despite their policy differences) will assure the continuation of American democracy, the rule of law and obeisance to the US Constitution.

How significant the number of Independent-leaning Republicans and Republicans will vote for Kamala is hard to say, but I’m optimistic not only because Trump represents the worst in the American spirit, but that Kamala Harris represents the best.

George Stephanopoulos has done America a great favor in publishing his readable and well-researched analysis of every American president’s use of the White House Situation Room (aka Sit Room) since it was established during the presidency of John F. Kennedy in Stephanopoulos’ The Situation Room – The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis (2024). To learn how other recent presidents (e.g. G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden) engaged fully with the Sit Room, American intelligence and military experts, and foreign policy crisis’s, I am filled with horror with what Trump did, did not do, and never learned to do as Commander in Chief. Stephanopoulos reveals Trump’s abject incompetence and the danger he poses to western civilization and America’s standing in the world.

As we now anxiously watch how the post-debate Biden crisis unfolds, wait for Stephanopoulos’ interview of Biden on Friday (July 5) and whatever other unscripted interviews the campaign arranges for Joe in the short term, and witness the precipitous loss of public and congressional support for Joe that may well compel him to step aside (despite his expressed intention to continue the campaign), the book reminds any objective reader again of Joe Biden’s personal, moral, intellectual, and presidential superiority over Donald Trump.

I quote below directly from Stephanopoulos’ research describing many insiders’ description of Trump’s lack of use of the Sit Room (pages 271-298) and his chaotic, thoughtless, ignorant, small-minded, egocentric, self-serving, and dangerous approach to foreign policy while President, and what we can certainly expect should he (God forbid) be re-elected in November.

Here is some of what Stephanopoulos wrote:

As Omarosa put it in an NBC interview: “This is a White House where everybody lies. The president lies to the American people. … Sarah Huckabee stands in front of the country and lies every single day.’’… Faith and trust were apparently in short supply in this White House… Almost nothing about it [Trump’s Sit Room] was normal… During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed.

Trump tore through and wore out his national security team: Four secretaries of defense. Four directors of national intelligence. Four White House chiefs of staff and five secretaries of Homeland Security. The most damning judgments of his competence and character come from those he appointed to these most sensitive positions [each of whom were key players in the Sit Room]. His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, famously told colleagues that Trump was a “f_ _ _ ing moron.” James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, described him as a threat to the Constitution ‘”who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try.” Fellow Marine general and White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “the most flawed person I have every met in my life.”

“He was the least disciplined, least organized human I ever met in my life,” Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert told me. No matter how hard his top aides and cabinet members tried, “None of them stopped him from constantly undermining us and making decisions outside the process.”

“Anybody with any sense-somebody like Mattis or Tillerson – they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,” Bossert recalls. “I mean, you couldn’t get Mattis into the White House. His view was “That’s a madman in a circular room screaming. And the less time I spend in there, the more time I can just go about my business.” In fact, Tillerson and Mattis began meeting regularly outside the White House in order to circumvent the President.

National Counter terrorism Center head Nick Rasmussen served for two years under Obama, followed by a year under Trump. The difference, he told me, was profound. “The tempo of the White House Situation Room meetings went way, way down in the Trump administration,” he recalls. “In the Obama years, I would have been to the White House three, four, five times a week” for meetings at all levels. “In the Trump administration, it could be weeks and weeks without any involvement or meetings.”

“I don’t think we got Trump into the Situation Room, in my year and a half there, more than four times,” Bossert told me. “He didn’t like that room. He didn’t like the idea that he had to go to it. He wanted everybody to come to him.”

Trump rarely sought out information from the Sit Room. He didn’t request reports, and he never called down with questions. I asked Bossert whether it was fair to say that for Trump, Fox News channel was as much a conduit of information as the Sit Room. “I don’t even think that’s in question,” he replied. “I think that’s one hundred percent accurate.” Then he told me something I’d never heard before.

“For a while, he didn’t want to see what the news channels were saying. He wanted to see what the chyrons were reading,” Bossert says. Chryons, of course, are the news briefs crawling across the bottom of the TV screen. “He wanted the chryons captured and printed… And so the Sit Room would do that. They would produce for him books of chryons prints” surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House.

Trump’s penchant for inviting random people into sensitive meetings led to some uncomfortable moments. Those who didn’t have clearances, but were reluctant to defy the president, would find themselves facing irritated intelligence officers. Classified briefings became fraught, with no one in the room comfortable except for Trump, who seemed happy to have his posse with him.

After Bossert had left the White House, he received a call one day from President Trump.

Bossert was in South Korea at the time, and both he and the President were using cell phones. “I said, ‘Sir, don’t even begin this conversation,’” Bossert recalls. “I’m in a foreign country where I’m connected to their network. There’s a hundred-percent chance your phone’s being listened to, and ninety percent chance mine’s being listened to in this country. Us together on this phone call, it’s a hundred thousand percent guaranteed that they‘re listening.”

Trump replied, “Okay, Tom. You tell them I’m sick and tired of them!” And then he went on with the conversation, completely ignoring the warning. You know, he just wouldn’t listen,” Bossert says, a sense of wonderment still in his voice.

And as much as Trump complained about leaks, he also used that phone to become, essentially, leaker in chief.

“I caught him doing it,” Bossert told me. “I was walking out of the room, and he picks up the phone before I’m out of earshot and starts talking to a reporter about what just happened. And I turned around and pointed right at him. ‘Who in the hell are you talking to?’” the President essentially shrugged, seemingly unbothered at being caught.

“He does it, so he assumed everybody was that way,” Bossert says. “His paranoia was in part because he assumes everyone else acts like he acts.”

…President Trump’s capriciousness drove [National Security Advisor John Bolton] particularly crazy. I asked him how different Situation Room meetings were under Trump than under the other presidents. “They were a disaster,” he told me. “He had no idea what the issues were. He never learned anything.” Bolton believes that Trump felt “out of his element. He was surrounded by people, every one of whom knew a lot more than he did. And so he liked to retreat to the Oval office.”

“He came in thinking that his personal relationship with foreign leaders would define the quality of bilateral relations,” recalls Bolton. “He’s still saying it today. ‘I had a good relationship with Putin … with Xi, or had a bromance with Kim Jung Un’ or whatever.”

You get the idea. Stephanopoulos continued with a description of Trump’s dangerous incompetence during the Covid epidemic, his refusal to wear a mask and his forbidding others in the White House to wear masks because he thought it made everyone appear weak, the impeachable telephone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky in which Trump tried to muscle Zelensky to give him dirt on Biden in exchange for already congressionally approved military equipment, Trump’s fixation on buying Greenland and making a trade for Puerto Rico after the island suffered a devastating hurricane (to get rid of the problem despite Puerto Ricans being citizens of the United States), and, of course, January 6.

The last chapter on Biden shows a fully engaged, informed, reflective, inquisitive, and decisive president who read in granular detail the briefing books presented to him by intelligence community experts, and based on all the information he had, informed by decades of his foreign policy experience as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Vice President, made reasoned decisions. Biden’s greatest failure was the American exit from Afghanistan. Stephanopoulos describes what happened there and why.

The book is a fascinating read, and for history lovers and those who want to understand what’s behind some of the most serious foreign policy crises’s in the last 65 years in every presidency, you won’t be disappointed.

Last Thursday evening was devastating for anyone who loves and respects Joe Biden and for those millions of Americans and world leaders who fear another Trump presidency. I have found myself taking both sides of the argument about whether President Biden should step aside and open up the convention in August for another candidate to emerge, or to tough it out and presume that Joe and the Biden Campaign know what they are doing and are going on overdrive to take back the initiative with a full court press with Joe as the Democratic standard bearer.

Since last Thursday’s disaster, pundits across the spectrum have weighed in on what should happen next and what likely will happen next. The very best advice I have heard is for all of us to cool it for a week or so, take a deep breath, keep the panic at bay, let the dust settle, and wait to see what Joe and the campaign choose to do.

As one individual, I recognize that I have no power or influence to compel a decision one way or another anyway, and neither do any of us. Only Joe and Jill Biden and a few of his closest advisors know in their hearts whether he is capable of serving effectively as President or not. He knows what it takes to do so and he always, characteristically, has placed the best interests of the nation and the American people first. I have to assume that that is what he intends to do. It seems, so far, that Joe and those around him believe he can do the work of the presidency despite what happened at the debate. Certainly, if he does stay in the race and it remains a Biden-Trump contest, there ought to be no question about the choice. Not voting cannot be a third option. Too much is at stake for the country and western civilization.  

I am grateful this morning for the lead Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer that spelled out what is before us. Read it here To Serve His Country, Donald Trump Should Leave the Race

I’m relieved this morning after watching President Biden deliver the State of the Union message (also a campaign speech) last evening. I’m relieved because it was clear that he still has what it takes to be president, fire in the belly, intellectual acuity, moral clarity, understanding of American history and policy, a grasp of the many issues confronting America in this dangerous era of anti-democratic demagoguery at home and abroad, and common decency, integrity and respect for others.

By nature, as a liberal, I know I’m not alone in being concerned, nervous, disturbed and confused by Biden’s low approval ratings despite his significant legislative and international accomplishments and despite the respect with which he is held as the leader of the free world by America’s allies. My general nervousness that Trump could be reelected remains given what is likely to be a very close election determined by 6 or 7 swing states. But, Biden’s primary weakness – his advancing age – doesn’t concern me that he can’t do the job of president though much of the public’s perception of his age concerns others.

Yes, Biden is old – but clearly he still intellectually has what it takes to lead the country. He also has smart and decent domestic and foreign advisors around him, and his long governmental and lived experience and the wisdom he has gained over many decades gives him a unique perspective to understand where we are along the arc of American history and where he wants to lead us. Like President Obama before him, Biden’s administration is remarkably devoid of corruption and scandal. Not so, of course, with Trump whose administration is likely the most corrupt in all of American history. The old adage that the fish stinks from the head is true with Trump.

When I compare Biden with Trump I’m amazed that any thinking and decent person can support Trump given his massive deficiencies in character, his autocratic disrespect for the law, his responsibility for the insurrection on January 6, his rape and fraud convictions, the many indictments against him waiting adjudication, his massive hostility to the constitutional order and his indecency as a human being. The contrasts between Biden and Trump are so vast that they boggle the mind. I understand that good people will disagree about policy choices made by Joe Biden. That’s normal in a democracy and so I can understand classic Republicans choosing not to vote for Biden or Trump in the general election, though there are conservatives like Liz Cheney who will hold her nose and vote for Biden because she understands that the future of American democracy requires her to do so.

A few years ago, I compiled a list of adjectives used by journalists, op-ed writers, psychiatrists and historians to describe Trump’s character. I counted 170 words and posted them here in a blog. As this presidential campaign heats up, I’m re-posting that list again. Taken individually and together they constitute a sweeping condemnation of a man who has caused millions of Americans to lose their independent judgment, to set aside their courage to resist immorality, to fear a vicious president who will stop at nothing to destroy them personally and publicly when they challenge him, and to compel them to bow down and kiss the ring of a fascistic leader.

Here is that list. If there’s a word you’ve heard about Trump that doesn’t appear here, please send it to me and I’ll gladly add it for the next time I post the list:

“Twice-impeached, convicted rapist, convicted fraud, one-man-crime-wave, corrupt, unprecedented, pathological liar, dishonest, deceitful, grifter, denier, deceptive, insincere, untrustworthy, duplicitous, hypocritical, angry, argumentative, oppositional, divisive, aggressive, mob-boss-like, cyber-bully, intimidating, threatening, vindictive, superficial, uncontrollable, theatrical, unsure, arrogant,  bravado, show- off, rage-filled, controversial, outrageous, arrogant, entitled, intolerant, insensitive, uncaring, hardhearted, indecent, disrespectful, shameless, craven, hostile, hateful, ruthless, cruel, mean, malevolent, dystopian, dark, base, low, abhorrent, decrepit, egoistical, egotistical, self-centered, narcissistic, malignant, unwell, mentally ill, delusional, pathological, unhinged, nihilistic, self-serving, selfish, chaotic, unpredictable, childish, cowardly, manipulative, ignoble, shameful, deplorable, discreditable, licentious, lecherous, reprehensible, sexist, misogynist, racist, white supremacist, Islamophobic, homophobic, poisonous, odious, toxic, evil, bad, criminal, wrong-doer, amoral, immoral, ignominious, worst, catastrophic, chaotic, calamitous, ruinous, disastrous, devastating, damaging, destructive, back-stabbing, double-crossing, two-faced, unfaithful, faithless, loser, weak, morally profligate, sacrilegious, soulless, disloyal, cheater, thief, fraudulent, scandalous, despicable, rancid, grievous, churlish, rude, ill-mannered, bad-tempered, cynical, appalling, profligate, ignorant, foolish, stupid, inflammatory, degenerate, debauched, imprudent, alarming, clownish, reckless, dangerous, murderous, violent, extremist, unworthy, unfit, dysfunctional, incompetent, ineffective, irresponsible, unaccountable, culpable, failed, subversive, illiberal, authoritarian, fascistic, anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, dictatorial, lawless, autocratic, seditious, traitorous, treasonous, insurrectionist, un-American.”