"…Indeed, Trump has shown, over and over, that he has no real ability to make moral distinctions about anything. Perhaps nothing illustrates this vacuousness more than Bob Woodward's report that when Trump decided to run for president, an aide told him that his previous pro-choice stances and donations to Democrats would be a problem. "That can be fixed," Trump said. "I'm—what do you call it? Pro-life." As Groucho Marx is rumored to have said: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them … well, I have others."
But there is also a laziness in Trump's casual slanders against America. If Trump admits that the United States is a far better nation than Russia or China, with a heritage of liberty and democracy that imposes unique responsibilities on America as the leader of the free world, then he would have to do something. He would have to take a stand against Russia's military aggression and China's economic predations. He'd have to take the hard path of working with a national-security team to forge policies that are in the long-term interests of the United States rather than the short-term interests of Donald Trump…"
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/06/trump-insults-americaagain/683384/
