Maintaining Empathic Sanity in Trump America

From Gulf of America to mass expulsion of “illegals” (people of color) to continuing genocidal complicity in Gaza to whatever the daily news brings us... welcome to Trump America! Welcome to the small-minded white nation so many long for, free once again from those large, inconvenient values—e.g., the Declaration of Independence—that keep disrupting the way things are supposed to be.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”

Cone on! In Trump America, those words were never meant to be taken literally. They create a sense of what I call empathic sanity, which has led to, for instance, the civil rights movement. But as President Donald Trump understands, empathic sanity can’t compete politically with hatred and fear—the creation of some good solid enemies—especially when mainstream Democrats, in their desperation for financial backing, are more than willing to shrug and minimize their values in the name of compromise.

If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments.

Trump, on the other hand, snorts at compromise, at least publicly, and pushes the agenda that works politically. He’ll do so even in defiance, for instance, of the Supreme Court, which recently demanded the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the hellhole prison in El Salvador to which he was sent without trial, without charges, without any chance to plead innocence. Garcia is a legal U.S. resident (father of three children who are U.S. citizens, husband of a U.S. citizen) and didn’t commit a crime, but he was snatched by ICE agents out of the blue and sent to a foreign prison. Team Trump has ignored the court’s demand for Garcia’s return, declaring that his deportation was an act of “foreign policy”—which they can conduct free of oversight.

This is all about clearing the country of enemies: of non-whites. Call them terrorists, call them criminals—dehumanize them—and then deport them. In Trump America, this is foreign policy. Millions of Americans are now in fear of deportation—for expressing the wrong political opinion (stop bombing Gaza), for simply being the wrong color.

And as Thom Hartmann pointed out, Trump is planning to up the ante. His team could start going after “you and me”—U.S. citizens who simply annoy him politically. Hartmann quotes Trump, in conversation with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele: “Home grown criminals. Home growns are next.”

And he adds, referring to the prison where Garcia was sent (the U.S. pays El Salvador for its use as a human dumping ground): “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

Trump as a looming Hitler? Yes, I’m sure that’s part of the current state of America, but in the present moment the primary issue is the full-on return of racism. As Clarence Lusane writes in The Nation:

There is a straight line from the 2017 “unite the right” rallies in Charlottesville to the far-right-led “Stop the Steal” movement to lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs to Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to power. No president in the post-civil-rights era has been as racially aggressive as the now-47th president.

Trump, Lusane notes, is the nation’s “white nationalist in chief.” His actions three months into his second term range from renaming the Gulf of Mexico (what was it again... Gulf of Some Country a Little Further North) to “re-renaming” military bases after Confederate generals to shutting down all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs to stopping “the expanding population of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the United States.”

Indeed, Lusane writes: “The second coming of Trump will be one long slog through the bowels of racial animus and juvenile reprisals. Permanent resistance is the way forward.”

Permanent resistance is certainly necessary, but as I think about what this means, I return to the concept of empathic sanity—that is to say, valuing all of humanity and working to create a world that works for everybody. There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.

What might this mean? Here’s one example, from Jewish Voice for Peace, regarding a rally a number of organizations held recently—on Passover—in New York City. Common Dreams quotes the organization’s social media post about it:

We are outside Federal Plaza to say: Stop arming Israel. End Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Free political prisoners held by ICE. Stop the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and students.

They chanted for peace in all directions: “None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free.”

Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Jay Saper, whose great uncle had been at Auschwitz, put it this way:

This Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we cannot celebrate as usual while Palestinians in Gaza face famine and the U.S.-backed Israeli government uses starvation as a weapon of war.

The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical: It calls us to strengthen our commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people. We commend the courageous students and all people of conscience raising their voices in dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners.

“The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical”: That hits the heart of it. No real values are theoretical. If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments. This is not a simplistic cry. It forces us to grope for understanding that lies well beyond the borders we have set for ourselves.