Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Over the last eight years, we have seen a widespread and pernicious sort of moral blight that has infected the very heart of our country, which is the doing of one man: Donald J. Trump. Trump lies, he bullies, he cheats, he denigrates women, he deceives, he does not pay his debts, and he is (as of this writing) a thirty-four-time felon, but his worst offense is that he has made these behaviors seem normal.
Somehow, he has beguiled a significant portion of the American public, filling them with fear and hatred and seducing them with false assurances of safety and prosperity. He has made them believe America is a dangerous and terrible place filled with evil people and that he is the only one who can save them. He created this delusion, but he didn’t do it alone. He was aided and abetted by a cohort of corrupt and self-serving politicians seeking to establish a power base. They succeeded once in making him president are now on the verge of doing it again.
This mass delusion, this “orange plague” affecting our country is a product of the warped values eschewed by Trump and his MAGA Republicans, a crew including Marjory Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and more—along with those Republicans like Mitch McConnell who are complicit in their silence—will do anything to win, including sponsoring a candidate who is decidedly unfit to work at McDonald’s—much less be president.
Like the nobility in the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, these MAGAs want to sequester themselves from the masses they have deliberately infected with this “orange plague”. They insulate themselves with their money and their privilege and their entitlements because they fancy that they are better than their lowly voters. While allying themselves with Trump, they had thought themselves immune from the disease they spread among their followers, but now, as in Poe’s classic story, the “orange plague” has entered the sacred and monied halls of the MAGA elite. The moral sickness has infected Trump’s own people. The sad fact is that they do not recognize their own delusional behavior—and moral rot—or worse, they do not care.
And now, as he is running for a second term, it seems as if Donald Trump has entered a separate decline, one that is perhaps related to his moral rot. He is losing his mind. He rambles, he is incoherent, he makes no sense. Of course, he has always lied and obfuscated, bullied, and intimidated. Those are his trademark tactics, but this is different. He is going downhill.
During a recent town hall, he paused for an audience member to get medical attention and then led the bewildered audience in listening to an improvised “playlist” including Ave Maria and (over the objections of Loudon Wainwright) “Hallelujah”. Trump stood on the stage swaying and smiling like a lonely drunk at the end of the bar. Co-speaker South Dakota Governor Noem (the puppy killer) stood next to him onstage, trying to figure out what the hell was happening.
Like some cases of mental disability, Trump’s symptoms appeared gradually but became more and more obvious as time passed. Ramblings about choosing a demise between electrocution from boat batteries or being eaten by sharks, the laudable qualities of Hannibal Lecter, a giant faucet in California that turns the water off and on are only the tip of the iceberg. Trump has dismissed criticism of his ramblings, saying he creates “a weave” of different ideas, mentioning them at random and then synthesizing them into brilliant insights. Well, maybe in his own mind. He recently spent twelve minutes at a Pennsylvania rally talking about the size of pro golfer Arnold Palmer’s junk.
He is also more frequently mistaking times, places, and people. At a recent event, he exhorted everyone to vote on January 5th, called Charlottesville Charlottetown, and misidentified his own physician. At one point during his term as president, he used a Sharpie to extend a hurricane’s projected path to conform to one of his mistaken pronouncements. What did he think? That no one would notice? Or that because he was Trump, his words were the reality, part of the grand delusion.
Even in his more lucid moments, Trump’s vocabulary and reasoning barely top those of a fifth grader. He has become increasingly profane, repeatedly using the word “shit” in a Pennsylvania rally and then, at a Detroit rally, telling rally members to get their “fat pig” husbands off the couch to vote. His contempt for his followers in becoming increasingly transparent. Like the doomed royalty in Poe’s story, he believes normal rules and laws do not apply to him.
Is Trump’s decline a product of his own moral rot, or is it a separate affliction? Perhaps his self-absorption and selfishness, his delusional sense of self, his all-consuming narcissism has affected his grasp of reality, which was probably never that strong to begin with, is causing him to slowly decay. In a way, his mental decline, seemingly traveling on a parallel path to his moral decline, seems inevitable, but that may be a somewhat old-fashioned sort of sensibility, like a Dorian Gray vibe, that amorality is a sickness that can cause physical illness.
The Republican Party is also sick; it has lost its moral center. It has followed a man who has normalized crassness, criminal behavior, cruelty, selfishness, and demagoguery. It has stood by, like the royalty in Poe’s story, scoffing at the masses they have infected with hate, loathing, and divisiveness.
They do not recognize the creeping madness of their leader as madness. They simply see it as an extension of his warped narcissistic ideology. His hate-filled diatribes against immigrants, his name-calling, and his misogyny are the bread and butter of his political platform. And now, not surprisingly, his current attacks against his own voters, his profanity, and his rambling diatribes about penis length don’t seem that weird. While his calling January 6th a day of love raised some eyebrows, even his listening party don’t see these behaviors as that much of a deviation. And no one gets away with this stuff except Donald Trump. Imagine if Tim Walz or Kamala Harris told voters to get their “fat pig” husbands off the couch to vote or started talking about Arnold Palmer’s manhood.
Donald Trump has infected our nation. He has instilled fear and hate into the national sensibility. He is a paragon of moral decay and is himself in a state of mental decline. He is weak and befuddled but the Republicans who prop him up refuse to acknowledge the truth, that he is a sickness, and that his continued presence will do nothing but contaminate our country further. He is the orange madness.