During a two-hour interview with The New York Times on Jan. 8, President Donald Trump, who has bombed boats leaving Venezuela and had that country’s President Nicolás Maduro captured and brought to the U.S. for trial, was asked if there are any limits to his power.
“Yeah,” Trump grunted inelegantly. “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He continued, “I don’t need international law.”
Apparently we can all now rest assured, knowing that Trump’s finely tuned sense of morality will guide him as he navigates his Machiavellian world of might-makes-right, with or without the constraints of international law. Clearly, with Trump’s sense of morality as his guide, the U.S. no longer needs to stay in the dozens of international organizations from which Trump just withdrew us.
“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.”
— President Donald Trump, to The New York Times
Trump’s statement that he is constrained only by his “own morality” is at odds with the reality of what Americans consider moral. Indeed, according to a long-held theory of moral development from psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, Trump’s moral development resembles that of a toddler, not of a seasoned statesman or thoughtful head of state.
Kohlberg began studying moral growth in children in 1958 and developed a six-stage theory that describes individual morality as evolving sequentially, with later stages building on earlier reasoning. Stage 1 involves avoiding trouble and following authority figures. In Stage 2, people ask, “What’s in it for me?” That is, they seek reward and personal gain.
Adolescents and most adults move on to Stage 3, in which they seek approval and want to be judged “good” by those around them. People who reach Stage 4 respect authority, want to maintain social order and obey laws out of a sense of duty.
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Only at the much rarer later stages do we begin to contemplate abstract principles such as justice. At Stage 5, laws are for the greater good, and we begin to recognize the importance of individual rights. At Stage 6, universal ethical principles emerge. We follow a personal code of ethics and care about concepts like justice and human rights.
Stage 2, the “What’s in it for me?” stage, is where Trump seems to be perpetually stuck.
Trapped at one of Kohlberg’s lowest moral levels, Trump behaves like a child who sees the world only through the lens of what is best for him. Trump is encumbered by neither compassion nor a concern for justice or human rights. He appears incapable of understanding, for example, why Americans are sickened over a mother who was killed in Minneapolis last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
He shows no sympathy for the families whose health care and food benefits he has taken or threatened to take. He shows no concern for immigrants separated from their families and demonstrates no compunction about putting their children in cages. He displays no inkling that Canadians or Greenlanders are appalled by his threats to annex their homelands. He seems to think Canada should appreciate being our 51st state and that he could just give people in Greenland a wad of cash to make them OK with the U.S. forcibly annexing their territory.
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Trump has exhibited no awareness of the disgust many Americans felt at the artificial-intelligence-generated video he posted depicting himself, crown on head, flying a plane and dropping excrement on people he was elected to serve.
He gave no indication that he understood how offensive it was for him to host a “Great Gatsby”-style Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago while millions of laid-off government workers worried about where they would get their next meal.
Trump’s greatest crime might not be the damage he has inflicted on our political system or even on our democracy, but rather what he’s done to us — altering how we see the world and leading us to believe that what was once intolerable is now normal, acceptable behavior.
Fortunately, the American people are not trapped in Trumpian morality.
Fortunately, the American people are not trapped in Trumpian morality. Trump has misjudged us. Even Trump supporters in Congress who like his policies are starting to break ranks, shocked and disturbed as they watch the president rip apart the norms that guide our daily lives and what we expect from others.
As someone trained in ethics who has interviewed and written about people who lived through the Holocaust, I am convinced that there are absolute moral values. Leaders like Trump can ignore truth and human decency. They can manipulate words and try to legislate away morality, but moral values still exist. Strong, empirical evidence from animal studies and child development shows that an innate human desire to protect and promote human flourishing is part of our DNA.
Indeed, it may be one of the key characteristics that defines us as humans. Certain acts violate that core sense of who we are and how we should behave as human beings.
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Inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, ignoring due process of law, blatantly engaging in political gerrymandering and intimidating elected officials: These crossed a line for most Americans. Even loyal Republicans like Liz Cheney and Russell Bowers were appalled at such acts.
Political leaders may shout and rant about their slogans, but a desire for warmth, compassion and kindness exists in all except the psychopaths among us. We are born wanting to be loved. Most of us eventually learn that we cannot expect to receive love unless we are willing and able to give love in return. Claiming humanity in ourselves means recognizing and honoring it in others.
These sentiments may be especially strong in the U.S., a nation founded on the idea that some truths are self-evident, including the belief that everyone deserves decent, fair treatment simply by virtue of their being human.
Trump ignores this reality. He doesn’t see the disconnect between what he finds acceptable moral behavior and what the American public considers moral behavior. The irony of his being stuck in the “What’s in it for me?” phase is that such a worldview has the potential to cost him the votes for Republican candidates he wants elected in the 2026 midterms. His inability to see and understand what the country considers moral may cause the voters to impose restraints on him that he won’t put on himself.
Kristen Monroe
Kristen Monroe is the author of the forthcoming book, “Morality in Politics: How Donald Trump’s Assault on America’s Moral Foundations Will be his Downfall,” and is a Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor and Director of the Ethics Center at UC Irvine.
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