Moral Misconduct – a Trump Legacy – Haunts the GOP Now and in Future!

By Donald A. Collins | 13 January 2023
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

The gross misconduct of the GOP under Trump greatly swayed Americans in the midterm elections which kept Democrats in increased control of the US Senate and ceded only a razor thin House majority to the GOP.

Rarely has a feeling of moral disgust so affected our election results. Recalling the scandals in Grant and Harding Administrations, those iniquities concerned specific felons, not perceivably most of the whole upper level of Trump and his allies! Names like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani come to mind.

Quoting SA’s Editor, Laura Helmuth,

Moral injury is newly being recognized as a serious and widespread type of psychological trauma. It starts when people are forced to do something that violates their moral code, such as when a hospital has more patients than it can treat and doctors and nurses have to triage health care. Psychiatrists are finding evidence of moral injury in teachers, lawyers, people who served in the military, and more. They suspect many cases are unrecognized because people aren’t familiar with the concept. As science writer Elizabeth Svoboda explains, understanding this type of trauma can be the first step to healing.

This phenomenon’s significance seems particularly important in understanding the much larger and deeper impact of not coming to grips politically, culturally and socially with the consequences of moral turpitude at our highest levels of governance!

Trump’s legacy of lying seems to have had little or no effect on the behavior of the newly elected US House GOP majority as their leaders seek to undermine democratic choice in voting and reproductive options.

The GOP program for governing seems focused on attacking Biden using immigration as a political weapon but refusing to support new laws to fix the present chaos at our Southern border!

After the IRS failed to audit Trump’s tax returns, the new GOP House leadership seeks to reduce IRS’s budget! Will less IRS money make its morality better? Or the rich safer from audit?

As for morality on abortion choice our primary villain is the US Supreme Court’s majority who undermined women’s heath and privacy by using a right wing Roman Catholic tenet in making its Dobbs decision!

For example, a pregnant Roman Catholic teen from a prolife family of limited means knows she wants to go to college but as a mother probably won’t.

A pro-choice politician in a predominantly red county must go along with an uncomfortable prolife stance or lose a job he needs to support his kids who are college bound.

Watching the Netflix series The Crown on the inner lives of Queen Elizabeth and her family provides multiple instances of how immoral is keeping divorces, marital relationships or any standard common human problems hostage to royal protocol and traditions to avoid adverse tabloid coverage and keep their lavish lifestyles going.

Everyone in the Royals’ inner circle would seem to suffer moral injury.

Harry and Megan took the SA article’s advice on how to begin to recover and left. Are their big profits from their public disclosure of Palace immorality immoral?

Having archaic rules about divorce, birth control, and sexuality based on religious beliefs has doubtless caused much human anguish.

Liberal Catholics such as President Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined most Americans in opposing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is regarded by most Americans as inflicting widespread moral injury!

New US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s greed for temporal power caused him to lose his better instincts on Trump’s impeachment and required his multiple immoral acquiescence to Trump’s power. The immoral GOP right wingers now will greatly control House governance.

While what constitutes morality can be hard to define, each of us has a personal moral compass, not always analogous to what most of us would regard as moral behavior.

Multiple examples exist of utter immoral and unrepentant souls whose chance of suffering guilt are zero include Trump and his cronies. For such people the only morality is not being caught in criminal acts.

America after Trump has suffered great moral injuries as we can now see so clearly in the behavior of Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos and Matt Goetz who now symbolize the kind of moral standard of behavior we must remove from office to recover from the injuries they have inflicted on our fragile republic!

No wonder people of both parties saw the value of having a moral President whose personal values reflect those of most Americans even if many disagree with some of his policies. Let’s continue to avoid moral injury as much as humanly possible.

Will Americans notice the difference between how Biden has handled his alleged possession of classified documents vs Troop’s? Hope so!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?” and “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”.

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