Opinion | I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain

Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an assault on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.

Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary. Even when Trump doesn’t wield state power, when he is merely campaigning, Trump wields cultural power. Under cultural tyranny internal values become arbitrary too — based on his whims and lusts of the moment.

The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, subtly and insidiously, people develop more nihilistic mind-sets.

Trump has already corroded the Republican Party in just this way. Let me focus on one value that Trump has already dissolved: the idea that there should be some connection between the beliefs you have in your head and the words that come out of your mouth. If you say something you don’t believe, you should at least have a twinge of guilt about your hypocrisy.

I used to at least hear Republicans express guilt privately when they publicly supported a guy they held in contempt. That guilt seems to have gone away. Even the contempt has gone away. Many Republicans have switched off the moral faculty, having apparently concluded that personal morality doesn’t matter.

Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party. Any stable social order depends on a sense of legitimacy. This is the belief and faith that the people who have been given authority have a right to govern. They wield power for the common good.

Trump assaults this value too. Prosecutors are not serving the rule of law, he insists, but are Joe Biden’s political pawns. Civil servants are nothing but “deep state” operatives to take Trump down. This cynical attitude has become pervasive in our society. Proper skepticism toward our institutions has turned into endemic distrust, a jaundiced cynicism that says: I’m onto the game; it’s corruption all the way down.