PAGE 14 | MAY 18 – 24, 2017
NATI O NA L
‘To Be Great, You Must Be Good’
I was deeply honored this week when U.S. Senator and recently-past Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine went out of his way to provide an exclusive half-hour interview for my weekly newspaper, the Falls Church News-Press. It’s actually the third time this has happened as Kaine, now seeking re-election to the Senate, also did it when he was running for governor of Virginia and for the Senate for the first time. This time, with the nation gripped in the Trump presidency crisis, Kaine struck a theme that it essential for the country, for his party, and for all who struggle for the progressive values of the American constitutional democracy: namely, for one to achieve greatness, one must be good. Clearly, the contrast of this notion to everything Trump represents couldn’t be sharper. Mr. “Make America Great FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS Again” is without a doubt the leastgood president the nation has ever had, so the prospect of any national “greatness” on his watch is unlikely indeed. He cried yesterday in a commencement address that “no politician in history has been treated worse or more unfairly” than he. Actually, it’s more accurately that no politician has been less good, at least that we know of in the U.S. What do you need to show to demonstrate this? His treatment of women? His chronic lying, going back to his days insisting President Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and demanding that his staff do likewise? His bragging about charitable giving that he never actually provided? His pattern of stiffing business partners and sub-contractors? He is an ordinary immoral thug, a junior partner in the Russian mafia that is just now beginning to call in favors (such as special tours of the Oval Office and regular classified intelligence dumps). His business career was dependent on these mafia thugs, aka Russian spies and compromisers, and he adopted their style and lack of scruples. After all, it’s viewing and treating people as less than dogs that underlies the mafia’s m.o. But as the Jesuit-trained, former foreign missionary and anti-red lining lawyer representing the poor, Tim Kaine told me this week, he views the awful Trump presidency as a clarion call. “Things happen for a reason,” he said. “This time, we’ve been shaken out of our complacency.” With people agitated and activated to the level they’ve been since January, the challenge has been to define a direction, an identity, to carry nation forward. Huge amounts of theorizing and podium-pounding has been devoted to this already, and in this context, Kaine’s formula is disarmingly simple and I think profound: “Nobody can promise greatness if they don’t demonstrate goodness.” In this context, the leadership of the so-called “evangelical” movement in this country has chosen to embrace the moral midget and thereby to seal their own fate as hideous hypocrites and agents of the degradation of the nation and its people. Not infrequently eloquent Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, in his column, “Wrong Savior, Evangelicals,” this week wrote, “In the compulsively transgressive, foul-mouthed, loser-disdaining, mammon-worshiping billionaire, conservative Christians have found their dream candidate.” The occasion was the invitation extended to Trump to deliver the commencement address at Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University. Falwell is outdone by another evangelical offspring, Franklin Graham. The cost of their devotion to Trump, Gerson wrote, is “becoming loyal to a leader of shockingly low character” and “have associated their faith with exclusion and bias.” Another cost is the inevitable and long-overdue demise of their own mammon-worshiping fakery. Since Trump’s election last fall, many churches have experienced an upsurge in interest and attendance. Young, serious parents have begun looking for solid moral ground to establish a way forward for their lives in a world gone wacky. The great appeal of Pope Francis, whom Kaine visited in February and shared a lengthy conversation in Spanish about the refugee crisis, is his surprisingly humble and non-judgmental approach to faith that has an appeal to all destabilized and challenged to address solidly and with gravitas the current crisis. A universal concept of goodness, in this context, can be found in the simple Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Nicholas F. Benton
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
When the World Is Led by a Child
At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabblerousing populist or a big business corporatist. But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that fundamentally he is none of these things. At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif. First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom. Trump’s answers in these interviews are not very long — 200 words at the high end — but he will typically flit through four or five topics before ending up with how unfair the press is to him. His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work. Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself. “In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” he told Time. “A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,” he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech. By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase “priming the pump” (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself. He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which
David Brooks
the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies. Third, by adulthood most people can perceive how others are thinking. For example, they learn subtle arts such as false modesty so they won’t be perceived as obnoxious. But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much. Which brings us to the reports that Trump betrayed an intelligence source and leaked secrets to his Russian visitors. From all we know so far, Trump didn’t do it because he is a Russian agent, or for any malevolent intent. He did it because he is sloppy, because he lacks all impulse control, and above all because he is a 9-year-old boy desperate for the approval of those he admires. The Russian leak story reveals one other thing, the dangerousness of a hollow man. Our institutions depend on people who have enough engraved character traits to fulfill their assigned duties. But there is perpetually less to Trump than it appears. When we analyze a president’s utterances we tend to assume that there is some substantive process behind the words, that it’s part of some strategic intent. But Trump’s statements don’t necessarily come from anywhere, lead anywhere or have a permanent reality beyond his wish to be liked at any given instant. We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar. “We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there is no there there?” And out of that void comes a carelessness that quite possibly betrayed an intelligence source, and endangered a country.