Donald Trump has announced that he would like the United States to take over the Gaza strip, ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population, prohibit them from returning to their homeland, and turn what was once the Palestinian coastline into the next Trump real estate development—a “Riviera of the Middle East,” as he calls it. Asked whether he was proposing to buy Gaza from Palestinians, he said, no, he was just planning to take it and perhaps own it personally. Asked what authority he had to simply take Gaza from its residents, he said “the U.S. authority.” He didn’t seem to think there was a need to show that taking Gaza is legal, let alone moral. For Trump, the fact that he wants something is sufficient proof that he deserves it.
As of this writing, Vice President J.D. Vance does not yet appear to have weighed in on Trump’s “Gaza development plan” (as the New York Times euphemistically called his genocidal scheme). But Vance made comments a couple of weeks ago that are relevant to understanding both the Gaza scheme and the broader thrust of the Trump-Musk-Vance administration. (I put Musk in between Trump and Vance because he appears to have somewhat less power than the president but substantially more than the vice president). Vance said that Christianity teaches that we must care about those close to us first, and those far away from us afterwards. “A lot of the far left,” Vance said, has “inverted” this concept, and they “care more about people outside of their own borders.” Vance said this was the principle of “ordo amoris” (the order of love), and it meant that “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” According to Vance, the principle means that “The British prime minister should care about Brits, and the French should care about the French.” For Trump, this means that we should care more about the U.S.’s ability to gain valuable real estate for no cost than about the human rights and basic dignity of the people who inhabit Gaza.
Vance’s comments earned him a special rebuke from the Pope himself, who issued a statement reminding Christians that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Now, I personally agree with the position that you are morally permitted to show more love to your family than a stranger, and I think our relationships with those near us create special moral bonds. But I don’t think Vance has thought much about the implications of his principle, and does not seem to realize the ugly places that nationalistic morality (in which I should care more about the members of my “nation” than those outside it) can lead to. How many lives around the world could the U.S. sacrifice to bolster our own prosperity? Is it permissible to commit a genocide if doing so makes your “nation” (I put the term in quotes to remind us that nations are mental constructs that ultimately don’t make much sense) marginally more safe? This is not an abstract question, since there are those in Israel for instance who believe that if killing every Palestinian would guarantee permanent Israeli security, it is morally permissible. And while Vance’s “order” suggests that at some point, we will care about the rest of the world, in practice, I don’t think the MAGA movement believes we have any obligations to non-Americans. Look at the casualness, even glee, with which Elon Musk has been condemning Africans to suffering and possible death by recklessly cutting off aid. During the presidential campaign, Vance himself showed no hesitation to push false, racist narratives about Haitian immigrants, furthering Trump’s claim that Haitians in Ohio were stealing and eating pets.
Last September, Vance was criticized by the Republican governor of Ohio, who pointed out that Haitian immigrants were in fact decent people fleeing violence. Even though Trump and Vance were causing people to irrationally fear and distrust their Haitian neighbors, and their policies would send Haitian migrants back to face poverty and violence, neither Trump nor Vance showed the slightest contrition for pushing horrible bigoted lies.
Apologies are simply unknown in MAGA morality, as we learned recently when Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (not an actual government department, but mainly a group of 20-year-old internet trolls who follow Musk from agency to agency destroying the infrastructure of government) briefly fired a staff member over a history of racist internet posts. “I was racist before it was cool,” he had written, encouraging people to “Normalize Indian hate.” But J.D. Vance, whose wife is Indian American, said that the firing was unfair, because the staffer deserved “grace” and he didn’t “think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” (The staffer in question was a 25-year-old adult in a high-ranking government position, and the posting was from last year, so he was not a “kid” by any reasonable definition of the word.) Interestingly, when Indian American congressman Ro Khanna asked if Vance would at least demand the staffer apologize, Vance issued an indignant reply on Twitter (“X”), saying that this was “emotional blackmail.” In other words, even when you’ve done something plainly morally wrong, you shouldn’t have to apologize for it in order to be forgiven. “Grace” is extended automatically to young racist Musk supporters (not to Haitians fleeing poverty). That is the Trump philosophy in a nutshell: do what you like, no matter who you hurt, and never apologize.
I think a lot about the kind of world that Trump, Musk, and Vance are building. These men are hugely visible, there’s a whole generation that will grow up seeing them at the pinnacle of power and social prestige. What lessons do they impart? Well, chiefly: be cruel, be lawless, be selfish, tell lies, make money, fuck the rest of the world. They also seem to revel in their own ignorance. Vance recently gave a speech waving away AI safety concerns (we can’t think about such trivialities if we want to beat China), despite showing no apparent familiarity with the very serious dangers that AI presents. Musk doesn’t even realize what he’s cutting off funding for and is happy to spread brazen falsehoods about the important federal institutions he’s destroying. These men seem to entirely lack conscience or compassion, which is one reason they horrify Pope Francis.
The MAGA politicians in power are now almost all climate change deniers, and they’re trying to purge any mention of the most serious catastrophe facing humankind. They are pushing an ethnic cleansing plan for Palestine. They are destroying the apparatus that protects consumers from predatory corporate behavior. And they are fostering a culture in which sexual abusers, outright bigots, fraudsters, and corrupt public officials are rewarded, not punished, for their behavior. Trump does not use his platform to tell Americans to care about one another, but rather to encourage a bloodthirsty, arrogant, ignorant machismo. I worry that he is planting seeds that will sprout in 10, 20, or 30 years, even should we make it through his second term. And I fear the kind of world that will be built by people like this, those who are incapable of self-criticism and who think of themselves as being in a “crusade” against forces they do not in the least understand but know that they fear and despise.
I am probably going to be writing a lot of articles with this general theme over the next four years, but I learned from Bernie Sanders that it’s important to be a broken record on things that matter. We must expose the plutocrats for who they are, and we must build an alternative, one that does not offer fake populism but authentic social democracy. I am going to say this over and over again until I am out of breath (or rather, since I am a writer, until my fingers get numb). We do not have to live in a world ruled by malicious idiots like Trump, Musk, and Vance (actually Vance may not be an idiot, just malicious). We can come together and build a humanistic, solidaristic movement for something better. People are starting to get it. Just today I talked to a friend who has sprung into political action and is now trying to organize friends and family to pressure Congress to stop the right-wing agenda. (Without external pressure, it’s clear that feckless Democrats will do nothing except whine that they have no power, or in Chuck Schumer’s words, lie down on the tracks so they can be run over by the Trump Train.) I would remind every reader of this magazine that the expression “be the change you wish to see in the world” is not just a cliche, it is a genuine demand. If you do not like what is happening, you must—we must—act, to the best of our capacities. Those capacities vary (I have spoken to people who fear deportation should they become politically active) but everyone can do something. The MAGA agenda is unpopular and is likely to alienate and anger huge swaths of the American public. The task now is to get people to feel that they can, and must, resist.
