Note: This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson on July 18, 2018.
We invest in our heroes. We invest them with our trust, our faith, and we invest in their promises. We share in our hero’s vision and revere his or her efforts to achieve that vision. Heroes become a tool with which we can conveniently stop agonizing over our own motives and with some confidence say, “I know the truth about myself, who I am, and the ideas that shape me.”
But, in retrospect, what if we have chosen the wrong hero and one day realize, “My God, he turned out to be a real Jerk. Does that make me a jerk too?” That troubling question you’ll put at first only to yourself, and probably only in a whisper. It’s not until maybe later that you’ll ask a friend, relative, cleric, or shrink if you are a jerk. The hardest conversation will be with someone who never believed in your hero and perhaps even tried to point out to you what were obvious flaws in your hero’s makeup and agenda.
So, again, how do you respond to yourself, “Am I a jerk for choosing a false idol?” Assuming that you don’t just deny your fallen hero ever was, in fact, your hero, here are some possible positions to weigh before you reach a conclusion. You make excuses for your ignorance because you had the wrong information: “I only watched Fox News.” You minimize your complicity: “I never really was some kind of sign-carrying radical for the cause.” You hem and haw over the minutiae: “He did do a couple of good things.” You still respect his big ideas: “He genuinely understood my concerns and my problems.”
Any or all of these rationalizations are intended to get you off the hook and to restore some part of your self-regard and resuscitate your self-respect. If so, you’ll probably come away concluding, “So, no, I’m not a jerk too.”
By now you’re suspecting, correctly, that this is leading up to Donald Trump. Let’s suppose him to be the hypothetical hero who is later acknowledged a full-blown jerk. In this individual case, you’ll have to admit (unless, again, you’re in denial) to Trump’s racism, his greed, his misogyny, his disdain, his contempt, his hypocrisy, his hatefulness, and most recently his patriotic lapse (or treason, maybe) in Helsinki. I don’t think there will be many Mr. Rogers-type characteristics in the litany.
Now the question you ask yourself becomes more focused. “Am I a racist too; am I greedy, hypocritical, hateful, unpatriotic?” It’s no longer just a simple “Am I a jerk?” It will take a lot more time for your self-reflection, during which you’ll have to consider examples of Trump’s policies, his body language, his tweets, his overall behavior and demeanor. What were your takes on his separation of refugee children from their parents? Of his declaring a trade war with our closest allies? Of his Muslim flight ban? Of his manhandling of the press? Of his predations on women? Of his embrace of Russia and Putin? Of his inflated ego? Of his bullying?
That Trump justifies and even glories in his negatives, under the cover that they help him make America great, does not transform them into virtues, or absolve him of eroding our ethical and moral standards. It’s depressingly ironic that instead of him draining the swamp, he’s restocking it. His character flaws are exactly the same as those that have always weakened the countries and causes of past dictators and despots. They didn’t work for Germany’s benefit under Hitler, or Russia’s benefit under Stalin, or Islam’s benefit under Bin Laden, or Spain’s benefit under Franco, or Haiti’s benefit under the Duvaliers. And on and on and on. They turned all these failed leaders into major bad actors, imprinted them as evil, and turned their countries and causes weaker.
Armed with his own arrogance and conceit, Trump boasts that his strengths are godlike, such that history will come to revere, maybe even worship, him. In fact, history will repeat itself and Trump will be dragged off his cracked pedestal, just like Saddam was in Iraq. After his descent, America will stagger to reclaim its stature as a land of equal opportunity, a shining beacon on a hill, a place to dream big American dreams, a refuge. We were not, in truth, invariably such a place at every time in our past, but Trump is being his worst self to make sure we never will be again. He wants to turn us all into jerks.