Trumpism Is Destroying America’s Civic Morality

The Lincoln Memorial has always had a potent symbolism that our other monuments don’t quite have. Lincoln himself has become a symbol of aspiration to, in his words, the better angels of our nature, a hope that this country with all its myriad flaws could nevertheless try to become something better. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart goes to the Lincoln Memorial to reflect on the fact that American politics is a much uglier business than he had expected. In 1939, when the singer Marian Anderson was denied a chance to sing before an integrated audience at Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to perform at the Memorial. In 1963, it was the site of the March on Washington.

For Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, he hosted a UFC fight weigh-in there.

“Without civic morality, communities perish,” said Bertrand Russell, a mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel Laureate, and he was right. If you were politically conscious at all before 2016, the era that we’re living through feels like darkness at noon. Scandals that would have been career-ending in politics now just unfold on a weekly or even daily basis: 10 years after Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns was major news, the fact that he x even as he tries to promote UFC event on the lawn of the White House barely made a murmur.

But it’s not just financial corruption, though it’s become plainly obvious that this administration is a cash grab for anybody who is politically connected. This administration is tacky and incompetent, the latest exhibit of which has been the saga over the reflecting pool. What is the reflecting pool worth? I don’t know, except that it’s held up as an important physical space in our capital, and Trump has managed to mismanage it into a literal swamp. Everything this administration does is tacky and in bad taste. Remember Kash Patel going snorkeling in the wreck of the USS Arizona? Pete Hegseth’s endless surf-and-turf meals at the Pentagon? They’re living it up and scoring perks while letting everything else go to pot.

More fundamentally, it’s the base cruelty of everything this administration does. They’ve managed to bring back slurs into everyday life: as my friend David Perry noted, the r-word has been forcibly spat into public discourse when just a few years ago it was anathema to say out loud. The drone strikes on fishermen in the Caribbean were preceded by drone strikes on wedding parties in Yemen, but now the killings are totally unmoored from any kind of objective except getting clicks on X. They make memes out of people tearfully being put in handcuffs. DOGE’s cuts to USAID are on track to kill just under 10 million people by 2030.  It’s why their tackiness and basic lack of decency is actually indicative of who they are: they don’t think rules apply to them.

It’s a government by and for abusive patriarchs, wannabe alpha male bullies, incels, and Christian nationalists. It’s why this administration went out of its way to get the Tate Brothers out of jail. Indeed, this is the crux of it: the collapse of morality and decency within this administration is very much about gender and sex. Their vision of masculinity is about as toxic as you can imagine: extractive, cruel, performative, and exceptionally selfish. People only matter if they can be dominated. This is the real crisis of masculinity; caring, nurturing, even expertise are treated as feminine qualities that can be disregarded as weak.

And in case you thought the consequences were solely that public life is just ugly or cruel right now, think again. This is a government abandoning the common good, abandoning the  notion that it has any real obligation to the people living in its borders. What’s the lesson that people will take from that? That government cannot and will not help them. The administration is not subtle about broadcasting this message: in June of 2025, officials were toying with how to get rid of FEMA. Combined with the corruption that we see everyday, the takeaway is everybody lies. Don’t trust your senses. Perversely, it works to the benefit of authoritarians because people then retreat into cynicism and distrust, which makes it harder to take any kind of action.

Moreover, it’s not just our politics, because civic morality isn’t solely a political project. It has to be held up by all of our institutions—churches, universities, unions, the media, and others. And yet, for the most part, they have folded in the face of pressure. Some of their refusal to hold people like Trump accountable is simple fear of being sued, and so they seek accommodation instead. But that isn’t the sole reason.

The truth is, for many institutions ending their role in upholding accountability is also a license to do what they want, when they want. Ending their own accountability to society at large makes it easier to shake off any kind of accountability. For universities, abandoning this role has also meant that they can continue silencing student protests over Gaza, attacking free speech and undermining labor protections. For those working in the private sector, there’s no fear of being canceled when they use slurs. Labor unions like the Teamsters see an opportunity to abandon actual class mobilization in exchange for the Trump Administration backing off of corruption oversight. No more having to think about #MeToo, no more concern about collective responsibility. All of this creates a feedback loop, because the institutions that could hold this government are being incentivized not to do so.

Where does all of this go? There are historical precedents for this: I wrote an essay last year comparing Trump to Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator of the Congo, and what happens to a country when corruption becomes normalized. Mobutu famously said in a speech that, “If you want to steal, steal a little in a nice way. But if you steal too much to become rich overnight, you’ll be caught.” Mobutu stole a lot, the people below him stole too. And for ordinary people, the end result was being forced to steal just so that they weren’t destitute. Corruption wasn’t about getting ahead, it was about being able to get enough to eat. By the time Mobutu left power, the country was virtually bankrupt despite its incredible natural resource wealth. The same things have played out in Hungary and Russia, where corruption and democratic backsliding eroded people’s livelihoods and hopes for the future.

It might seem quaint to talk about civic morality. A younger me probably would have sneered at it because the people who talked that way were invariably socially conservative Republicans fighting against gay marriage and drug decriminalization. It’s cringe. It’s also essential to the functioning of a healthy democracy, and we can’t fight cruelty and immiseration with hip cynicism. Detachment from all of this, shrugging and giving up because it’s just what we’ve come to expect is exactly what they’re hoping for.

How do we fight this on this especially grim 250th anniversary of this country? We need to bring back shame. A few people like Ezra Klein or Gavin Newsom cozied up to the likes of Charlie Kirk out of a mistaken belief that we need to accommodate their perspectives. Philosopher Olufemi Taiwo has pointed out, shame is actually an essential behavior in policing what a society will and will not tolerate. While our most powerful institutions might be loath to act, they can also be vulnerable to pressure from boycotts or negative attention: we have to look for places where they are vulnerable, and call out their wrongdoing.

In the same vein that we need shame, we need to attack the manosphere and pull men out of its toxicity. It’s oxygen for this administration, and the abuse that they carry out is intended to further stoke the manosphere ideology. We dismantle it through community. We can’t simply attack it without having a way to reintegrate the people who’ve fallen prey to it. We need to think about how to rebuild community, both physical and digital, in the 21st century. Academics sometimes refer to these as “counterpublics”: they’re spaces where our values can meaningfully be on display. Even as we name and shame institutions for failing to live up to them, the ones that do need to be a host to the rest of us.

There are a whole host of things that we will need to do once this is over: I’ve written about them elsewhere, and so have many other people. One thing to close on:we need a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), much like South Africa’s after apartheid. A TRC is not a perfect thing; there’s been a lively debate in South Africa for decades about whether the TRC allowed perpetrators to evade accountability. Instead, we need a TRC as a public venue—a memorial—to firmly establish what our values are once we’re on the other side of Trump. It’s a chance to offer a moral vision of who we ought to be and what true civic morality is.