The Default Setting of the American Soul

What if our national moment of reckoning—our real “never again”—had started when a presidential candidate mocked a disabled journalist? Not after the felony convictions, not after the violent insurrection, but in that early, undeniable moment when cruelty was offered without apology, and we all saw it. Instead of theatrics and moral outrage, what if the public had responded with clarity and resolve, simply rejecting him as a viable option? Not because he was uniquely cruel, but because he gave that cruelty a platform, and in doing so, tested the nation’s willingness to excuse the inexcusable.

We’re told that democracy is a choice. But what does it say about us that this man was presented—twice—as one of only two? That the bar for “presidential” now includes mocking a vulnerable person onstage to win points in a branding war. That act, dismissed by many as a performance, revealed more than gaffes or misstatements ever could. It wasn’t a slip. It was strategy. He wanted to show that he could violate basic decency and be applauded for it. And he was.

That moment set the tone. It marked the beginning of a long campaign not just against civility, but against accountability. So when his 34 felony convictions were announced—stemming from falsified records used to conceal campaign finance violations related to hush money payments—it wasn’t a shock that they didn’t matter to his base. Not really. They didn’t see it as a disqualifier. They saw it as a defiance badge. His legal consequences were public, undeniable, and historically significant. But the weight of those facts did not dislodge him. If anything, it fed the machine. The courts affirmed his guilt; the voters reaffirmed his power.

His other civil judgments, like the one that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, were similarly absorbed into the noise. By the time he was sentenced in January 2025—receiving an “unconditional discharge” with no jail time, fines, or probation—the narrative had moved on. Justice had become theater. The law had bent itself into accommodation.

When people insist he was the “lesser of two evils,” they ask us to forget what we saw and heard. They want to collapse the moral distinction between offensive policy and offensive behavior, as if a man who mocks the disabled in public somehow represents an acceptable spectrum of leadership. As if it’s petty to demand emotional maturity and character from someone who holds the nuclear codes. I might have entertained that argument—tried to parse policy from personality—if it weren’t for that one moment. Because in it, everything was laid bare.

There was no satire to soften the blow. No moment of learning or self-awareness. He didn’t stumble into that gesture. He reveled in it. And when the crowd responded with laughter, he knew he had struck something deep and ugly in the American psyche. That cruelty could be reframed as courage. That laughing at someone else’s limitation could be passed off as bravery—because he “says what he thinks” or “doesn’t care what people say.”

That wasn’t strength. It was license. And it worked.

Once upon a time, satire played a different role. In 1971, the same year Trump Management was sued for refusing to rent to Black tenants, All in the Family aired a now-famous scene in which Archie Bunker delivered a racist monologue at the dinner table, his ignorance exposed through comedy. The point wasn’t to normalize his views. It was to provoke discomfort, to force the viewer to confront their own biases through laughter that cut both ways. Carroll O’Connor, who portrayed Archie, understood the danger: he called his character “a man who was wrong and knew he was right.” That’s what made him so difficult to dismiss—and so important to watch.

But Archie was fiction. Trump is policy. There’s no off-screen lesson, no reflective arc. Where Bunker was held in tension between audience empathy and critique, Trump received applause. People now look back at All in the Family and say, “At least we could air that then,” as if it was evidence of greater tolerance. But that reading misses the point. What made the show subversive is precisely what Trump’s rise abandoned: the belief that exposing prejudice should lead to reflection, not power.

And yet we chose him. Twice. Seventy million people. Some called him the “lesser evil,” others an outright savior. But they put him in office just the same. He wasn’t punished for cruelty—he was validated for it.

That used to surprise me. Now it doesn’t. In America, the gap between rhetoric and behavior isn’t a contradiction—it’s a design feature. The Founders promised liberty and built a system of exclusion. They roused the poor to fight a war against monarchy, then repossessed their land, withheld their pay, and crushed their revolts. When men like Daniel Shays demanded what they were owed, they were labeled as threats to “virtue,” not patriots seeking justice.

George Washington, in an October 1786 letter to Henry Lee, described the Shays Rebellion as “a melancholy picture of the want of virtue in our citizens.” He didn’t name Shays, but he made the stakes clear. To Washington and the emerging elite, the real threat wasn’t tyranny from above, but rebellion from below. The Constitution wasn’t just a visionary document—it was a guardrail against the demands of the dispossessed. Property owners feared what poor, armed men might do in self-defense. They saw in them not fellow citizens, but future enemies.

In that worldview, leadership isn’t about service or moral clarity. It’s about control. Those without property, or decorum, or the right name, were presumed incapable of self-rule. They needed a master.

Trump, though a different kind of heir, operates in that same tradition. He moves through the world entitled to obedience, incapable of reflection. His base doesn’t mind. In fact, they identify with it. Not because they share his wealth or station, but because his behavior affirms their grievances. He mocks the vulnerable, and they feel seen. He lashes out, and they feel heard.

The most dangerous thing about him isn’t his ideology—it’s his instincts. He lacks empathy and views its absence as a virtue. And we rewarded him for it.

So no, this isn’t an aberration. It’s the default. We are a nation that once punished dissent from below as a lack of virtue and now rewards cruelty from above as a sign of strength. We mistake domination for leadership. We confuse shame for weakness. And we’ve let the language of moral relativism cover for what is, at its core, a profound failure to mature.

That’s what happens when cruelty becomes the currency of politics. That’s what happens when satire dies and spectacle takes its place.

And that’s why I’ll never forget that moment with the reporter. Because we could have stopped it there. But we didn’t.