Donald Trump's opponents have something he does not. And it will bring him down.
The president's greatest vulnerability was staring us in the face all along.
Last week, Donald Trump went after me and former White House lawyer Ty Cobb. He accused us of turning against him to “make a buck.” That’s when it hit me. I realized (or perhaps was just reminded) what his Kryptonite is.
Trump believes his opponents are just like him. He thinks they are similarly enslaved to the cruel master of wealth, desperate for power, chasing public adoration, and willing to sacrifice any moral or civic principle for leverage. That’s how he operates, so that’s how he assumes everyone else does, too.
Years ago, in my anonymous opinion essay in The New York Times, I wrote:
“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”
That hasn’t changed. What has become clearer is how that moral vacancy blinds him. Trump’s disconnection from any centering conscience acts like a blindfold in the fight he’s waging against his political opponents and personal enemies. He doesn’t know us. So he doesn’t know how to beat us.
The strategic blunder is fitting. Trump loves to name-drop Sun Tzu and the classic tome The Art of War. He even slapped a similar title on his ghostwritten book, The Art of the Deal. But he seems to have missed one of the most important maxims from the ancient Chinese military strategist, who wrote:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Trump fails on both counts.
In the first place, he doesn’t understand himself, which is why he’s so often confused, enraged, and unhinged when events don’t bend to his will. He experiences setbacks like they are not consequences of his own behavior but as personal betrayals by a world that — for some reason — refuses to comport itself to his own self-image. I can imagine that would be hard for someone.
But more importantly, he doesn’t understand his opponents. He assumes the people resisting him are driven by the same motivations he has, like money, status, revenge, and relevance. That misdiagnosis has left him repeatedly flailing, in large part because the pressure tactics he relies on to coerce those opponents simply don’t work on people who aren’t wired like he is.
Indeed, Trump’s opposition has something he does not. A conscience.
That’s what binds together the oddest political bedfellows these days — from the lifelong Democrats and disaffected Republicans who’ve come together in this fraught political moment to the libertarians and democratic socialists making common cause in pushing back against a wayward White House. They don’t agree on everything. But they are unified by a moral line they believe should not be crossed. And because Trump has no such line, he cannot understand why they won’t back down.
Take his attacks on me and Ty Cobb. In Trump’s words, we are:
“Just two DOPES trying to make a ‘buck’…”
He makes two profound errors here.
FIRST, he assumes we’re motivated by money.
In all honesty, fighting Trump has been the least lucrative decision of my life. I gave up senior government positions; wrote a book about Trump’s corruption and gave virtually all the royalties to pro-democracy charities; dissolved a small business and passed up lucrative jobs; poured my savings into legal costs and security as threats escalated; and at one point had to go on welfare to stay afloat. I even considered selling our home to keep going. These days, I run a nonprofit club that gives most of its proceeds away to combat Trump’s abuses of power. My salary is lower than it was in government, on purpose.
So much for cashing in. But you know what? I wouldn’t change any of it. Because that’s not the motive power of my animus toward Donald Trump. Not in the least. As you can see, I’ve gone to great lengths to deprive him of this argument.
Meanwhile, Trump himself is openly trying to monetize the presidency by cutting foreign deals that benefit his businesses, weaponizing lawsuits to make cash through coercion, suing the very agencies he oversees to force potential settlements where he could receive billions in taxpayer dollars, and seeking other novel ways to funnel public power into his own private profit. Of course he thinks everyone else must be doing the same; otherwise, he has to admit to himself that he’s the most corrupt president in American history.
SECOND, when you misdiagnose the problem, you misunderstand the solution.
This is why he seems so frustrated with me.
Assuming I’m driven by fame and fortune, Trump has tried everything in his playbook to upend my life. He’s threatened to put me on trial (“He should be prosecuted!”), tried to get me fired from multiple jobs (“They should fire, shame, and punish everybody associated with this FRAUD on the American people!”), warned that I would be harmed (“Bad things will happen to him!”), harassed my publisher and brandished legal threats to stop me from writing (“will probably be sued over his fake book”), put me under federal investigation (“I think he’s guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth”), and is trying to get me blacklisted in the media (“networks are forewarned not to put [him] on the air again”).
Yet I am unmoved.
I said something this weekend (after appearing on the same networks he tried to scare into banning me), and I will say it again, in case it has any chance of reaching Donald Trump’s aging eyes:
I cannot be bought.
I cannot be bullied.
I cannot be bribed.
And unlike you, Mr. President, I will not trade my conscience for a better room in a skyscraper.
Let’s go back to why Trump is so mad. If your enemy isn’t responding to any of your pressure tactics, you start to lash out. I see him flailing for solutions. And in the process, all he’s done is prove my point — again and again — that he’s willing to abuse your power for personal vendettas. This is thick with irony. In the course of trying to punish me for revealing impeachable offenses, Donald Trump keeps committing actual impeachable offenses, such as ordering politically motivated investigations.
Put another way, Trump’s lawless persecution of his enemies keeps expanding the list of criminal acts for which they will one day be able to hold him accoutable. It would be a Shakespearean tragedy, if only he had half the wit of even Shakespeare’s most flawed and infantile characters. (Even King Lear would be more qualified for the American presidency at this point.)
If Trump really wanted to throw me off, he could resign tomorrow. That would be a curveball. I’ve gone to great pains to reorient my entire life to challenge this wannabe dictator, and if he left today, I’m not sure what I would do with myself. Alas, I won’t hold my breath that he’s strategic enough to do it.
The tug-of-war dynamic doesn’t just apply to me. Across the country, Trump’s targets — public servants, journalists, judges, prosecutors, private citizens — have increasingly chosen defiance over submission. He is gobsmacked by them. He doesn’t understand why people won’t simply fold under pressure, take the deal, stay quiet, and protect themselves from his wrath.
What hit me again this past weekend is that collective moral refusal is both our superpower and his vulnerability.
Like autocrats before him, Donald Trump’s ethical blind spot is driving him into making more and more compounding mistakes. He’s engaging in power abuses that validate warnings about him, alienating new constituencies, and expanding the coalition determined to stop him. We’ve seen it daily in his second term. Each attempt to silence critics or punish perceived enemies creates fresh headaches. In other words, he is defeating himself.
This is the folly of would-be despots. Drunk on power, they try to crush dissent, only to discover too late that naked corruption inspires deeper and more determined resistance. At every turn these past few months — whether it’s cancelling Kimmel, investigating Comey, suing the Wall Street Journal, sanctioning America’s allies — you name it! — he’s overreacting and energizing the opposition. More than that, he’s creating new enemies.
So with this in mind, here’s what we do next. It’s quite simple.
We keep defying… because it is working.
To preserve the American Republic, we must stay focused on the Constitution, keep calling out violations of it, refuse to normalize what should never be normal, and resist the president’s futile efforts to shut us up. If we do that, and we keep doing that, our ranks will swell, and Trump’s servile circle of support will keep shrinking.
Nothing angers him more. Nothing distracts him more. And nothing will accelerate his political and historical collapse faster than a movement of people he cannot buy off or scare off — because they are a breed he cannot morally comprehend.
I was reminded these past few days why Donald Trump was never prepared to fight people of conscience. It’s because he’s never had one. And now he’s learning just how hard it is to make all of us go away.
Your friend, in defiance,
Trump attacks those he is jealous of! Wear your badge with honor!
The man has no conscience; everything is transactional with no morality.