I think the primary reason Trump provokes such strong revulsion in some quarters is that he represents the id of the America empire—the hideous, capering truth that so much of our culture is designed to obscure. A few examples: “You’re going to take Gaza under what authority?” “Under the US authority.” This sounds terrible… but how is it different, really, from American Exceptionalism? To me it differs the way “Where’s the crapper?” differs from “Pardon me, would you be kind enough to direct me to the restroom?” A few days ago, Trump said with regard to Ukraine, “I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth…Otherwise, we’re stupid...We have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money.” Trump’s take upset German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who responded, “Ukraine is under attack and we are helping it, without asking to be paid in return. This should be everyone's position.” Ah, everyone’s position should be that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to this completely insane and unnecessary war NATO provoked is the essence of altruism. But is the position the truth? Remember when Bill O’Reilly said to Trump, “But Putin’s a killer?” Trump responded, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Even Trump’s mere suggestion here, the equivalent of, “You don’t think water is wet?” caused an orgy of pearl-clutching among establishment media, which tried to twist Trump’s response into a defense of Putin. Why? Because what Trump said was untrue? Or because acknowledging the brutal truth of American power is understood to be indecorous and not the done thing? And think of how Al Gore is supposed to have said regarding rendition, “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.” (Consider too why the government calls these things renditions rather than kidnappings; why our invasions are interventions, our election meddling is civil society assistance, and on and on. For more, see Orwell on The Politics of English Language. Think of what McCain said about Obama in their first presidential debate: “[Obama] said he would launch military strikes into Pakistan. Now, you don’t do that. You don’t say that out loud. If you have to do things, you have to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government.” You don’t say that out loud! It’s impolite, it spoils the mood! Etc. The more obviously damning the truth is, the more elaborate the mechanisms for obscuring it (why do we call them cows when they’re alive, but they become meat, beef, and steak when we go to eat them?). And accordingly, the greater the professed horror of, and punishments meted out to, anyone who transgresses by ignoring or undermining those mechanisms. In his novel Watership Down, Richard Adams compellingly depicts in Cowslip’s warren a culture built on denial, and the penalties for anyone who pierces that denial. (I’m a big believer in fiction’s power to depict not facts, but truth.) In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.” Think of the levels of self-deception that America—which Martin Luther King noted over a half century ago is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—requires to behave in the world as it does. Trump’s unique sin isn’t that behavior. His unique sin is in failing to obey the agreed-upon norms and protocols our rulers engage in to conceal and distort the true nature of that behavior. His sin lies in exposing the engine, the foundation, the id that our culture insists we remain blind to. He is the embodiment of the thing we’re taught all our lives doesn’t even exist—at least not here in righteous, beneficent, altruistic America.