The Brooklyn Rail

In a December 2nd Washington Post column titled “A Sickening Moral Slum of an Administration,” conservative columnist George Will wrote, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Becoming the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America while possessing absolutely no qualifications for that position is another interesting achievement. In recognition of both achievements, Hegseth is destined for lasting historical infamy. In any other administration, Hegseth would be fired and prosecuted for murder.

What RFK, Jr. is doing as Secretary of Health and Human Services, with Trump’s blessing, in undercutting the vaccination of children for measles and Hepatitis B, is unspeakably arrogant and cruel. On December 5^th, the day Kennedy’s hand-picked panel of vaccine-skeptical advisors voted to end the decades old policy of vaccinating all newborns against Hepatitis B, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said, “Today is a defining moment for our country. We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines.” The Hep B vaccine as administered to newborns since 1991 has been 99% effective in saving children from the deadly effects of the disease. A CDC study estimated that from 2000 to 2019, vaccination saved 22 million children globally. Without the vaccine, poor children in the US who contract the disease will die.

When the stories of all the people Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security has snatched out of their homes and spirited away to distant countries begin to come out, the level of meanness and cruelty in these deportations will be overwhelming. Contrary to DHS’s repeated characterization of “criminal illegal aliens” being deported, recent data shows that about 80% of deported individuals had no criminal convictions at all, and only about 7% had serious/violent convictions. Even though Trump repeatedly calls them “criminals,” “rapists,” “murderers,” and “terrorists,” the deportees are mostly innocent people trying to work hard, raise their families, and provide a better life for them in the USA.

At least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted by Russians since they invaded Ukraine in 2014. This is the number of cases that have been verified by Ukrainian authorities. Russian officials have claimed that more than 700,000 Ukrainian children have been “relocated” to Russia, and that number is probably closer to the truth. The United Nations has decreed that these abductions are war crimes, and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their roles in this atrocity. The charges carry a potential life sentence.

Trump continues to abuse the Pardon Power granted to him in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. That power is intended to serve as acts of mercy or justice for the public welfare, with the goal of upholding justice and public interest. Trump has instead used it to undermine the rule of law by legalizing corruption and rewarding ideological and personal subservience to him. One of his most egregious misapplications of the pardon power is his pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of massive drug trafficking last year. Hernández used his position as President to help drug traffickers in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere to import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the US, while accepting bribes to protect cartel leaders from prosecution. The indictment said that Hernández “contributed with his co-conspirators to Honduras becoming one of the largest transshipment points in the world for United States-bound cocaine” coming from Colombia and Venezuela by boat and air.

The oleaginous Roger Stone, whose own prison sentence after being convicted by a federal jury of seven felonies was commuted by Trump in 2020, carried a letter from Hernández to Trump in which the former Honduran president claimed that he, like Trump, suffered political persecution and lawfare by the Biden-Harris administration for political reasons and “like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change.”

As Trump’s mental faculties fade, his moral depravity is less effectively concealed, although it has always been mostly in plain view. If Trump one day soon pardons his old friend Ghislaine Maxwell, it will split the Epstein Files issue wide open and cause Trump’s loyal base to make yet another determination of how much of their own morality they will forfeit to continue to support him. In the end, as always in a democracy, it’s not about Trump, but about us. What are we going to do to recover our democracy?

Marine corps combat veteran and writer Phil Klay wrote a guest essay in the New York Times on December 5, titled “What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes,” in which he said:

The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American—what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

Now that Trump can probably never be prosecuted again for his many crimes, what is left to constrain him from acting on his most depraved impulses? He recently mused that he almost certainly doesn’t have any chance of getting into heaven, and he must know by now that history on earth is not going to look kindly on his legacy. So what’s left for him? Trinkets and ballrooms. What will he do in the next three years to increase his wealth and power and seek retribution against his enemies? Is Trump now, for all practical purposes, an autocrat without a kingdom, and without a future?

The latest Gallup poll shows that voters under 30 went from a +10-point net favorable opinion of President Trump in February 2025 to a net -46 favorable opinion today, marking a 56-point drop in support for Trump. The poll also showed that among 18–39-year-olds, 49% now have a favorable view of socialism, and a 43% favorable view of capitalism. In 2010, they were +46 points net favorable toward capitalism, and in 2025, that has dropped to -11 points: a 57-point swing. Turn the volume up!