Egotism Versus Character
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In a recent speech near Atlanta, former President Obama said about another former president, Trump, “there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody, but himself.” In 2019, I wrote “Why Values Matter: Obama’s Empathy Versus Trump’s Egoism.” In his recent Georgia speech, Obama once again demonstrated that what was true five years ago, is still true today, more evident than ever.
Furthermore, Obama added this about his successor, “all he cares about is his ego, his money, his status. That’s his mindset. Those are his intentions.” And this about our upcoming (and because of early voting already-occurring) 2024 election: “the election is about more than just policies. It’s about values, and it is about character.” Ah, “values” and “character.”
Retired four-star General Stanely McChrystal, certainly no raging liberal, recently commented that character was his most important criterion for selecting a president, and he was therefore voting for Kamala Harris. In his Georgia speech Obama made the same point—Harris has values and character; Trump has egotism. “If you elect Kamala Harris, she [unlike Trump] will not be focused on her problems, her ego, her money. She’s going to be focused on you.”
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As this recent speech continued, Obama added that his mother taught him values, that he “didn’t always live up to those values,” but that he “internalized’ them, and they served as his “foundation.” He went on comment about some of Trump’s lies and falsehoods—a Washington Post fact-checking team concluded that during his presidency Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims. Obama also spoke of Trump’s machoness—a characteristic that, unfortunately, has become all too evident.
My 2019 contrast of Obama’s stress on values versus Trump’s indicated that as far back as Obama’s pre-presidential The Audacity of Hope he was stressing values. In that book he devoted a whole chapter to that subject, writing that empathy “is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes.” Moreover, in that chapter he added that “Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values,” and that the question of values should be at “the heart of our politics, the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies.”
By 2019, however, with Trump still president and with words more relevant than ever, Obama warned that “all of us have to send a clarion call and behave with the values of tolerance and diversity that should be the hallmark of our democracy.” And we should “reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.”
About the same time as Obama’s Georgia speech of October 2024, Trump was being his usual coarse self in campaigning in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Oct. 19 and then at New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) on Oct. 25.
In Pennsylvania, at the birthplace of golfer Arnold Palmer, Trump, indicated not only his coarseness but also his machismo. He had this to say about the legendary golfer: “Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
Trump also repeated his usual derogatory comments—and lies—about immigrants. According to The Washington Post, “He made up a story about an imaginary cartel leader named Jose Rodriguez using an imaginary phone app to call the U.S. government about smuggling people over the border.” And resorting to vulgarity, he called his Democratic opponent a “shit vice president.”
Almost a week later at New York’s most famous gathering spot, CBS characterized the Trump rally as featuring “offensive, crude commentary.” Although we shall look at Trump’s long, rambling speech shortly, CBS noted that “his remarks were overshadowed by the crude and offensive speakers that went before him, which included racist jokes about Puerto Ricans and Black people as well as prominent Democrats.”
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Trump’s speech itself was full of his usual dark belittling of his opponent—“Kamala’s gross incompetence disqualifies her from being president of the United States of America. She is grossly incompetent”—and his false charges—e.g., “Springfield, Ohio. . . . where 30,000 illegal migrants were put into a town of 50,000 people,” and Harris’s “egregious hurricane response, the worst response in North Carolina and other states since Katrina, but I think it was even worse than Katrina. They haven’t even responded in North Carolina. They haven’t even responded. There’s nobody. They don’t see any FEMA. You know why? They spent their money on bringing in illegal migrants so they didn’t have money for Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina.”
The irony of Trump’s speeches and rallies, the irony (as Trump exaggeratedly claimed at MSG “of so [many] Jews and Muslims and Catholics and evangelicals and Mormons . . . all joining our cause in large numbers”) is that religious people should emphasize character and values, but instead many are supporting a man who has displayed little of both. Overwhelming evangelical support of Trump is well known, and a recent ABCNews/Ipsos poll indicated that likely Catholic voters favored Trump to Harris by a 51-48% margin.
The split of the Catholic vote, however, indicates that many of that faith still support Harris despite her opposition to the severe abortion restrictions imposed by many Republican state legislators. As the Catholic Jesuit magazine America has recently stated it objected to the “overriding concern about Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge constraints on his own power, accept his 2020 electoral defeat or commit to respecting the outcome of the 2024 election.” It also opposes his immigration rants and writes “no just or moral policy can be built on racist, nativist fear-mongering.”
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In addition, the magazine notes that individual Catholics must follow their own consciences rather than replace them with a “judgment pre-approved by the church.” That is exactly what the Catholic President Joe Biden has done, and according to Pew research, a majority of “all Catholics find abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”
Regarding non-evangelical or non-Catholic Christians the percentage approving some forms of abortion is more likely higher, many believing that the choice should be more up to the expectant mother than to some government body. Harris herself goes to a Baptist church and has indicated that she prays “every day, sometimes twice a day.”
In summary, character and values do matter, and don’t look for them—the real deal, not the spewing of egotistic rants and grievances—from ex-President Trump and the Republican sycophants he has bullied into submission.