This is what happens when we have a morally lost president
What’s needed more than anything at this moment is to make our leaders moral again.
The Trump administration showed the world its true colors this week. Or, more accurately, its true color.
The president has halted the admission of refugees, including those who helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan and those fleeing war in Sudan and Congo. But he has made one exception: White South Africans.
“It is such an honor for us to receive you here today,” Christopher Landau, the No. 2 official in the State Department, told a group of 59 of these relatively wealthy migrants after they touched down at Dulles this week. He told the Afrikaners — the descendants of Europeans who ruled South Africa during apartheid — that “we respect the long tradition of your people and what you have accomplished over the years” and said of them: “When you have quality seeds, you can put them in foreign soil and they will blossom, they will bloom.”
The “quality seeds” phrase was straight out of the language of the eugenics movement — “Only healthy seed must be sown!” — from before the Second World War. Landau told reporters that Trump granted Afrikaners the exception because they had faced “egregious persecution on the basis of race.” Asked for examples, he responded with generalities, saying they “face the threat not only of expropriation but also of direct violence.” Trump himself claimed this week that the Afrikaners are victims of “genocide.”
But under the country’s “expropriation” law, no land has actually been taken from the Afrikaners, who are 7 percent of the population but own most of South Africa’s farmland. They face high levels of violence, but Black South Africans face even higher levels in what has been one of the world’s most violent countries for some time.
It’s hard to see this refugee policy, and the exception for Afrikaners, as anything but an assertion of white supremacy. What made the scene at Dulles even worse was the messenger. Landau’s father, George, and grandparents were Jews who fled Austria to escape the Nazis. In 2014, George Landau, who became an American diplomat, recorded a video for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in which he recounted that members of the family who stayed behind were deported to Poland and gassed.
Now, Christopher Landau is the mouthpiece for a policy that has closed America to refugees — except for the “quality seeds” of certain White people. I asked the State Department for a comment from Landau and was told by a spokesperson that the admission of the Afrikaners was a “tremendous accomplishment.”
This week, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean W. Rowe, announced that, “in light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice,” the denomination would quit its participation in the refugee resettlement program rather than obey the administration’s command that it assist the White South Africans.
“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” he wrote. “I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country. I also grieve that victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months.”
He asked church members to “pray for vetted refugees who have not been granted permission to come to this country.”
I am praying for them. And I am praying for us.
Trump, in his reign of selfishness, seems not to grasp that America is great because it is good. To see this, look no further than the election of America’s own Pope Leo XIV, with his long history of compassion for migrants and the poor. But Trump presents to the world the opposite: an America cruel to the least among us and indifferent to civilization’s struggle between freedom and oppression. What’s needed more than anything at this moment is to make America good again.
Last week, Bill Gates aptly characterized Trump sidekick Elon Musk and his destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and with it the food and medicine needed by millions of people. “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates told the Financial Times, saying Musk should “meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money.”
This week, Trump abandoned any pretense of conveying the American values of freedom and democracy on his trip to the Middle East, supplanting them with the Trumpian values of greed and transactional relationships. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity aboard Air Force One, the president praised the representatives of the Houthis, who have been attacking Israel and shipping lanes (“very strong, very powerful, very good relationship with them”) and China’s Xi Jinping (“have always had a great relationship, a lot of respect for him”). Instead of encouraging his autocratic hosts to hold elections, he complained about American elections, again claiming that the 2020 contest was “rigged.”
In Saudi Arabia, Trump was supposed to give a “major foreign policy address.” Instead, it turned into a celebration of himself, attacks on his predecessor and effusive praise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, the U.S. intelligence community concluded, personally approved the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “He’s an incredible man,” Trump gushed about MBS. “There’s nobody like him. … He’s your greatest representative. … I like him a lot. I like him too much. That’s why we give so much, you know? Too much. I like you too much. Great guy.” Trump said he was lifting sanctions against Syria’s government, even though its president once led a unit of al-Qaeda, at MBS’s request.
“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” Trump told his Saudi hosts.
The week brought a jarring juxtaposition of morality. Trump, in the Middle East, kept insisting that he was entitled to a more luxurious 747, while back at home, House Republicans assembling his “big, beautiful bill” approved plans to leave millions without health care and nutrition assistance.
Trump seems determined to accept his $400 million plane from Qatar, because the current Air Force One is “much less impressive” and the United States “should have the most impressive plane.” ABC News, which broke the story, says Attorney General Pam Bondi, formerly a lobbyist for Qatar, is set to approve the gift. Even some MAGA lawmakers and commentators objected to what one of their own, Ben Shapiro, called “this kind of skeezy stuff.”
The president responded with lies. “The Boeing 747 is being given to the United States Air Force/Department of Defense, NOT TO ME!” he posted (it would go to his library when he leaves office), and he reposted a claim that the gift was akin to France giving America the Statue of Liberty (receipt of that gift was authorized by Congress, and the statue didn’t go to Grover Cleveland’s presidential library).
That was just the latest scheme, on top of the crypto schemes that are enriching his family and friends. A regulatory filing by Trump Media disclosed that the struggling business, parent of Truth Social, paid its CEO, former GOP congressman Devin Nunes, $47.6 million last year — even though the company’s total revenue was only $3.6 million, as Allan Sloan reported for Barron’s. Meanwhile, Trump ally Shahal Khan, accompanying the president in Riyadh, secured $15 billion in new investment commitments for his business from the Saudis this week.
Contrast that with events on Capitol Hill, where the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Trump’s tax package, as drafted by House Republicans, would cut $715 billion from health care, most of that from Medicaid, causing 10.3 million people to lose Medicaid coverage and 7.6 million to go uninsured. No less of a Republican than Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called the Medicaid cuts “morally wrong.” Yet Rep. Andy Harris (Maryland), head of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, said the cuts don’t go far enough, calling the new work requirements in the bill “a joke.”
On top of this, the legislation cuts $290 billion from food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; that’s nearly one-third of the entire program. Also included: a 5 percent remittance tax to be levied on international money transfers such as the payments immigrants send to family members.
Though the trillions of dollars in tax cuts now in the legislation don’t significantly alter the relative tax burdens borne by the rich, the poor and the middle class, Republicans from high-tax states are pushing for an increased deduction for state and local taxes that would increase the tax cuts in the proposal by hundreds of billions of dollars. Almost all of that would go to households earning more than $200,000 annually.
Testifying before Congress this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continued to discourage people from getting the measles vaccine, even as more than 1,000 cases have been identified in the current outbreak. He claimed the vaccine contains “fetal debris,” that it wasn’t fully tested and that its immunity fades quickly. He suggested it is unsafe: “If I advise you to swim in a lake I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?” (One should probably not take swimming advice from RFK Jr. in any circumstance; on Mother’s Day, he took his grandchildren swimming in D.C.’s Rock Creek, where bathing is banned because of bacteria and pollutants from runoff and sewers.)
Testifying to another committee at the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem managed to convey equal disregard for the people in her charge. She has taken an expansive view of her job responsibilities, posing for photo ops wearing tactical gear, bulletproof vest, aviator jacket and firefighter’s uniform, and on horseback wearing a cowboy hat. But when asked about Andry José Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist deported to a Salvadoran prison without due process, Noem said that it wasn’t in her job description to find out whether he’s still alive. “This is a question that’s best asked to the president and the government of El Salvador,” she explained.
The Founders believed that presidents would exercise a certain amount of self-restraint. There would, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 68, “be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.” But self-restraint is not in Trump’s character.
This is why we see Trump and his aides threatening to sideline the rule of law. Top Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller, reacting to setbacks in court, said the president is “actively looking at” suspending the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus if the courts don’t rule in Trump’s favor. Trump’s solicitor general, challenging the constitutional provision for birthright citizenship before the Supreme Court on Thursday, declined to commit the administration to obeying a ruling from an appellate court. In another case, Trump’s lawyers drew such an expansive view of his emergency powers (he has already declared at least eight national emergencies) that one judge, a Reagan appointee, remarked: “There’s no limit, is what you’re saying — there’s no limit.”
The lack of self-restraint is also why we see the Trump administration’s breathtaking assault on free thought at universities (it cut another $450 million in grants to Harvard University this week to punish the school for rejecting its meddling), on the planet (now there are plans to abolish the Energy Star program, California’s emissions standards and limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water) and on the routine processes of government (the latest: sacking the librarian of Congress and blocking wire service reporters from Air Force One on the trip to the Middle East).
Above all, a president of more virtue would be more honest with Americans about the troubles they face.
“We just reached a historic trade agreement with the United Kingdom, and over the weekend, we reached a breakthrough agreement with China,” Trump boasted this week, saying he has “opened up” China. In reality, he has backed down from most of his tariffs, with little to show for it. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that “there’s scant sign of the substantial trade deals that Mr. Trump promises,” arguing: “As with last week’s modest British agreement, the China deal is more surrender than Trump victory.” Yet even with the retreat, the nation’s largest retailer, Walmart, said it would have to raise prices “even at the reduced levels” of tariffs announced this week.
Likewise, the vaunted savings from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which Trump said could be “close to a trillion dollars,” and which Musk originally predicted to reach or exceed $2 trillion, have shriveled to peanuts. Total savings appear to be a small fraction of the $170 billion now claimed, as the administration has had to own up to “mistakes” and reinstate many contracts and government functions. Trump’s many claims about investments in the U.S. — an “explosion” of $10 trillion is this week’s figure — have similarly proved to be imaginary.
In a social media post this week about a new executive order, Trump proclaimed that “Prescription Drug and Pharmaceutical prices will be REDUCED, almost immediately, by 30% to 80%.” What he didn’t tell Americans was that a similar order he issued late in his first term achieved nothing; it was struck down by three courts before the Biden administration abandoned the doomed effort in favor of a legislative fix for drug prices. A Raymond James analyst said this order, too, would be “all bark, no bite.”
Yet the flimflam keeps coming. By the time he reached Riyadh, Trump had revised his figures on the prescription-drug order, saying, “We’ve cut our health care [costs] by 50 to 90 percent.” He further announced that “we have no inflation” in the United States and that the economy is “rocking.” Illegal border crossings, he said, are at “an all-time low, down 99.999 percent.”
His Saudi hosts had to know it was all nonsense, and it’s not clear why they would care about his silly boasts. But they were shrewd enough to respond with the one thing this president values almost as much as a free airplane: frequent applause.
