"A Deep Soul Wound"

The Trump Era has hurt us all. Understanding how is key to preventing further injury.

The last two weeks, from the final days of the term of the Supreme Court through the signing of one of the cruelest, most corrupt and most perverse pieces of legislation in American history, was one of the worst periods I can recall for America in my lifetime.

We saw the right-wing majority on the Roberts Court take further giant steps toward being the undisputed worst court in our history as they granted further power and deference to the president, a license for him to act virtually unconstrained by law.

We saw a study published in the respected medical journal The Lancet projecting that Trump Administration cuts to U.S. AID funding could result in the deaths of 14 million people over the next five years.

Another report, from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, indicated that the true death toll in Gaza from the U.S.-supported Israeli devastation of that territory and its people may have already passed 100,000.

We then saw the U.S. Congress pass an immoral piece of legislation that will itself have a death toll, knocking as many as 17 million people off of healthcare coverage, denying access of millions more to care from hospitals that will themselves struggle and close as a result of the cuts, eliminating the ability of millions of Americans to get needed food aid, and exploding the federal deficit by many trillions of dollars. And it did all that to fund a vastly expanded armed police force to carry out the often illegal orders of the president…and, perhaps above all, to provide more tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

We have literally come to the moment in our history when we are sacrificing the lives of the poor to pay for the yachts of billionaires.

Then, over the weekend, children and scores of others died because they were not warned of horrific floods that swept them away in the middle of the night. The floods were caused by a climate crisis that the administration denies exists, denial that includes seeking to cut funding for vital government agencies that might confirm it is real and at the same time provide early warning and protection from natural disasters like the one that ravaged central Texas over the weekend.

Most Disturbing of All

In the midst of this were other news items that were equally as disorienting because of how inconsistent they were with the ideals and history we celebrate on Independence Day. For me, garnering less attention but one of the most disturbing recent developments, was the that the White House and the Justice Department now hold the view that president has the power to unilaterally nullify laws.

The idea, promoted by the administration, that the president may determine which laws to follow, which to ignore and which to violate, is the single most dangerous development in U.S. history since the Civil War. That the Supreme Court and the Congress have accepted it thus far is deeply ominous.

A corollary to this concept, which immediately turns a president into a despot, is the idea that decrees of the president via executive order or social media post, have the power of law. In this case too, the Congress and our highest court, have offered concurrence explicitly, by silence or by inaction.

The damage these ideas and their acceptance do to our democracy and the rule of law in America is not simply profound. It is fatal. Rejecting and reversing these ideas and holding their promoters accountable for the damage they've done, must, with regaining power, be our top priority.

But sometimes, as in periods like this one, our ability to act is constrained not just by our unfamiliarity with the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but also by the degree to which current events are so demoralizing that they momentarily shock us, disorient us, and even deeply depress us.

I know I have felt all these things. Honestly, it was, despite glorious weather, perhaps the bleakest Independence Day I have ever experienced, knowing how far we have drifted from the principles and the ideals on which our country was founded.

A Betrayal of Trust, But Worse Still…

I’ve searched in vain for a term that captured just what I was feeling. Certainly, the president, the majority on the Supreme Court, the Republicans in the U.S. Congress, senior officials in the Trump Administration and members of the media who have defended or sanitized or normalized the onset of authoritarian government in the U.S. have been guilty of a betrayal of the public’s trust. They have been derelict in their duty. They have abused power.

But those terms are abstract, projected on distant characters, people who may not even seem fully real to most Americans. Yet, there are very real personal emotional consequences that stem from watching America’s identity debased and its historical aspirations disrespected and denied.

I was speaking with a friend of mine, a brilliant professor at USC named Allison Agsten and she helped me find a way to express what I was feeling that I think may resonate with many of you.

Allison has devoted much of her career to issues associated with the climate crisis and how we communicate about it. In the wake of the wildfires that devastated parts of the L.A. area, she has also helped students try to cope with the feelings the disaster triggered.

She said the term that she had landed on to describe the feelings that her students were feeling that is also relevant to what all of us are grappling with these days is "moral injury."

This is a term that originally was used with respect to veterans who were traumatized by combat experiences in which they witnessed or were ordered to commit acts that they knew were wrong, violations of military or international law or foundational ethical or moral beliefs.

One of the first to write about this in the context of the experiences of veterans, Jonathan Shay described it in a way that seems relevant to the collective trauma we are all currently experiencing. He wrote of a leadership failure that was a “betrayal of what’s right, by a person who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situation.” Also cited in one of the overviews of moral injury that Allison suggested I read was a piece by author Diane Silver in which she spoke of, “a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society.”

Moral injury results from when someone in a high position of trust violates that trust in an egregious way, one that is so incongruent with our beliefs that it shakes us to the core, scarring us.

When a figure one trusts or respects or who holds a high office or position in society or in our lives—a parent, a priest, a commanding officer, a community leader or a president—and therefore who is expected to be an example and a guide grossly abuses their position it is profoundly disorienting. Even if we have come to doubt the person, there are boundaries we do not expect to be crossed.

Few of us expected the best of Trump. Indeed, given our collective experience of the past decade (more for those of us who have been following the man’s career), we expected the worst. But, nonetheless, many among us had at least a hope that there were constraints, guardrails, checks, balances, traditions, norms, something that would prevent the entire character of our government and perhaps even of our society at large to be coopted, seized, bent, twisted, perverted, and thus rendered profoundly different from what the past—or some version of the past that we had been taught to believe—had led us to expect.

You may find such an idea is itself an abstraction, perhaps. But personally, I’m very grateful for Allison’s insight into what I’ve been feeling. Both because it helps me get my arms around this difficult moment but also because I think it describes what is now a national trauma, one impacting tens of millions of us with consequences that are hard to fully understand as of now but which could be quite grave.

That said, I also feel that we do not have the luxury of simply gazing into our navels or wallowing in our feelings. We need to understand them and, where possible, use that understanding to help those around us. But then we must also tap into other feelings or find motivation where ever it may exist within us to take constructive action to undo the damage that has been done.

Accountability can help reset the sense of injustice that torments the victims of moral injury.

In my next “Need to Know” I am going to provide a list of how we get from here to there. It will zero in on ten things that Democrats and others who understand the urgent need for leadership change in America today might not have ever expected would be required of them. In other words, expect, more uncomfortable truths. (But note, this post will be for paying subscribers only so now might be a good time to sign up to help support “Need to Know.”)