The Inner Monologue

I try to be a decent human being.

I don’t always succeed. I get angry. I can be impatient, judgmental, and spectacularly short on charity when someone seems determined to exhaust it. But I have a standard I try to live up to: my success should contribute something to the world around me. Other people should have a chance to benefit from my being here.

I want to do well. I want other people to do well, too. Those desires have never seemed incompatible to me.

If I get ahead by making someone else’s life needlessly worse, I have something to answer for. If I hurt someone, “But look what I gained” is an admission, not a defense.

That is why Donald Trump gets under my skin.

I look at him and see a man who appears to regard the entire world as something to extract value from. People, institutions, public trust—everything becomes useful insofar as it benefits Donald Trump. Someone else can absorb the expense. Someone else can endure the humiliation. Someone else can clean up afterward.

And then I’m supposed to admire the winner.

By that standard, the person who empties the communal refrigerator has won lunch.

I have spent a lifetime exercising intelligence and judgment. I have had responsibilities that required me to think beyond what would feel good coming out of my mouth in the next thirty seconds. I understand that complicated problems demand knowledge, that consequences matter, and that discovering you were wrong creates an obligation to reconsider.

So yes, I find his apparent stupidity infuriating.

I mean the combination of ignorance, supreme confidence, and what looks to me like an absolute refusal to learn. The assumption that expertise is a personal affront. The conviction that saying something forcefully makes it intelligent, and repeating it makes it true.

Being wrong is ordinary. Being proudly unreachable by correction is a choice.

Give that choice power, surround it with people whose careers depend on applauding it, and other people pay the tuition for lessons the powerful man never learns.

That is where my disgust becomes something physical.

Because I try. That’s the part I keep coming back to. I actually fucking try.

I try to be fair when being unfair would benefit me. I try to understand things before declaring that I understand them. I try to consider people who cannot do anything for me. I try to leave something useful behind.

And then I watch behavior I have spent my life trying to rise above being celebrated as strength.

Selfishness becomes ambition. Cruelty becomes honesty. Ignorance becomes authenticity. Every ordinary expectation of decent conduct becomes some intolerable burden imposed on a man supposedly too extraordinary to meet it.

Apparently, the rest of us are suckers for making the effort.

Well, I reject that.

I reject the idea that having enough power entitles you to stop being accountable. I reject a definition of success that counts what you acquired and ignores who paid for it. And I reject the demand that I remain politely detached while those values become the operating principles of government.

So let me stop using words that are too small.

I don’t merely decline to support Donald Trump. I oppose him.

I don’t merely dislike him. I viscerally hate him and the regime built around him.

I hate what I believe he rewards. I hate what he encourages people to excuse. I hate the exhausting spectacle of watching adults discover, over and over, that their supposedly firm moral principles contain a special exemption for their favorite man.

And yes, that anger extends to the people who knowingly support him.

You have agency. Your support means something. You cannot celebrate giving a man power and then declare yourself unrelated to what he does with it.

When you see the conduct I find repugnant and cheer, you tell me something about yourself. When your defense is that the people being hurt deserve it, you tell me considerably more.

I am tired of being asked to treat that as an inconsequential difference of opinion.

It reaches into the foundations of how I think people should live together: whether honesty creates obligations, whether power brings responsibility, whether another person’s suffering counts even when exploiting it might help you win.

Those things matter to me. They are part of how I judge myself. Of course they affect how I judge you.

I know there is a tension in wanting to be decent while admitting this much hatred. I feel it. I have to answer for what that anger does to me and what I choose to do with it.

But decency does not require me to counterfeit affection. It does not require me to call my revulsion a misunderstanding so everyone can feel comfortable.

You wanted a reaction to the values you chose to celebrate.

This is mine.

And, borrowing freely from Shakespeare:

A pox upon his house—and upon the political house that keeps him in power.