Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of #indecency. At one point, #Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.
#AntiAmerican #democracy #law #Constitution #NeverForget #Epstein
“We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen,” Sullivan wrote.
The subject of #Trump’s #indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date.
In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that #Trump’s #indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, #Ukraine, invaded by another, #Russia, as the actual aggressor & force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-question-of-decency-bc2
For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—& our #politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s #narcissism, his #autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from #reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental #indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says & does.
