Visions of Life / Agents of Death: On Love Thy Neighbor and Love Thy Nature:

Donald Trump's world is a dead and lonely world, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing really means anything and no one else matters. Earlier this year, he pressed Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado into giving him her gold medal, because he does not comprehend that the medal is merely a symbol (a big shiny gold one to be sure) of honor, and to acquire it as he did is dishonorable. He confused a dead object with living respect, which cannot be extorted or bought. This grasping is evident in his dismissive words about the people who have already been killed in his newest war and those who might be.

It's evident in everything he does, and it leads to his inability to understand the limits of his hypermaterialist worldview. He acquired control over the building that housed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, thinking that he was thereby acquiring the prestige and the power over our arts and culture. But the Kennedy Center is not just a building you can grab and slap your name on. It's a system, a series of events and interactions, a whole network of relationships and principles and feelings, the feeling of performers who no longer want to appear there, of audiences who no longer want to buy tickets there, of employees who no longer want to work there. It's a system of relationships, not an alienable object. He has been forced to shut the building down while pretending it's for renovations rather than because the life in it has fled, and what he holds is a corpse.

He does not understand that the rules that apply to the acquisition of inert objects do not apply to the matters of the spirit and society. He cannot comprehend how honor and culture and admiration and community work or that the goods of the spirit can be inexhaustible – you do not run out of love through loving the way you might run out of cookies by giving away cookies, but also you cannot grab love or admiration or prestige the way you can grab a cookie. Which is also why he cannot understand the limits of power. The building is an object you can control, but the will of the people is something you cannot control through brute force. This deadness, this disconnection, is at the heart of the main thing he would like us to shut up about and forget, the Epstein files. It's behind the grotesqueness of his desire to develop Gaza as a resort for an international elite.

Auden outlines one of our strategic advantages: they routinely fail to comprehend motives that are not selfish. So the idealism, the altruism, the commitment to ideals and principles, that motivates the resistance is seen as a cover-up for the real motives, which helps them cast progressives as criminal or delusional, but also made them unprepared for the heroic solidarity in city after city.