Decency in the time of monsters

Friends,

Before I post my Sunday cartoon, I want to share with you some thoughts about the hellish fourth week of Trump II.

Trump increasingly resembles a monster — a creature that’s extremely powerful and dangerous and is inflicting extraordinary harm on human beings.

Elon Musk is also behaving like a monster. JD Vance is a baby monster in waiting.

The monstrous Trump-Vance-Musk regime (I can’t in good conscience call it an “administration”) has appointed a Star Wars cantina of other monstrous people.

Monsters abroad are eager to work with them. Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and the neofascist parties in Europe — which Vance and Musk are actively urging Europeans to support — would like nothing better than for the world to succumb to their monstrosities.

Authoritarians are attracted to one another because they legitimize each other. The more thugs in high places, the easier it is for another thug to make it to the top. Oligarchs also help boost each other’s power and wealth.

The rise of these monsters raises a profound challenge for the rest of us: How do we maintain common decency when monsters are in charge?

It was a question our parents’ or grandparents’ generation had to face when confronting the monsters of their era — Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco, as well as homegrown monsters such as the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Senator Joe McCarthy, and other bigots who fed off their fetid fumes.

I remember my father saying that while it was only natural to fear such monsters, we must not submit to them. We can’t let fear cause us to hide or retreat. If we submit to their bullying, we only encourage more bullying.

He said it was natural to worry about the monsters, but we shouldn’t obsess about them. We couldn’t let the monsters take over our waking hours, our conversations, our dreams. If we obsessed about them, we gave them power over us that they didn’t deserve.

And he told me that while it was natural to want to defend ourselves from the monsters, defensiveness was not enough. Defending ourselves would not stop them. We had to go on the offensive. Rather than retreat, we had to fight them. Rather than resist them, we had to overpower them.

Yet neither my father nor his generation faced the task of maintaining decency and integrity in America at a time when many people in positions of leadership in this country have joined the monsters or given in to them.

Part of the way to do this, I believe, is to celebrate integrity wherever we find it — such as in the public servants I listed last week in my post on “profiles in courage.”

On Thursday, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than obey an overtly political order from a top Justice Department official to drop a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Sassoon is not a liberal Democrat. She had been a law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia and was appointed to her position only recently by Trump. But Sassoon has integrity. She explained that the order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.” She continued:

“I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.”

Integrity can be infectious. Sassoon’s resignation was quickly followed by the resignation of five other Justice Department prosecutors.

On Friday, Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Adams, also resigned. Scotten condemned Trump’s political justification for dropping the charges against Adams, saying in his resignation letter that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.” He added:

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you [Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general] will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

These resignations represent the most high-profile public resistance so far to Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They demonstrate that Trump and Musk’s monstrous behavior has not been normalized.

It is important to remember that while the monsters claim most headlines, they are still the exceptions.

Despite the outcome of the 2024 election, most Americans are decent people who want to live in a decent society, and who reject bigotry and hate. That’s been my experience over decades of public service.

We can maintain our ideals by demonstrating them whenever and wherever we can — showing courage in the face of fear, protecting the vulnerable in the face of brutality, practicing kindness in the face of cruelty, and preserving what is left of our democracy in the face of tyranny.

We can maintain decency in the time of monsters. We must. It is the first step in resisting the monsters, and the prerequisite for overpowering them.