Trump Has Been Corroded by Hate

“Let’s talk about death.”

That’s what the 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat said to President Trump near the end of their interview that aired Sunday.

Douthat asked Trump what he thought would happen to him when he dies. “I’m a religious person, so in theory I go to heaven,” the president said. When Douthat pressed him on whether he actually believes he’s going to heaven, Trump replied, “I hope so. I don’t want to go to hell.”

Douthat then posed a hypothetical: “Let’s say you pass away, you’re entering the next life, and all you have to do to enter paradise is feel love and forgiveness for James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, anyone who you have expressed hate for over the years. Do you think you can do it?”

Trump acknowledged that the easy answer would be, Oh, yes, I could forgive. He didn’t give it. “I found them to be extremely dishonest people, very bad people, very bad for our country,” he said. Pressed again, he was blunt: “The answer is no.”

“Before the judgment throne of God?” Douthat asked.

Trump didn’t budge. “No, I think they were very bad people and—I dislike, I can use the word hate, I do hate some of my enemies.”

Moments later, he removed any doubt. Even before the judgment throne of God, with his eternal salvation at stake, would he forgive his enemies? “No, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”

NO POLITICIAN IN AMERICAN HISTORY has told as many lies as Trump. But on this question, I believe he was telling the truth. In one respect I give him credit for it. He might have just said he could forgive. That’s the answer we’re taught to give. Jesus told his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, and forgiveness is preached from American pulpits every week. But forgiveness is hard, really hard, and it’s especially hard to grant to those you believe have gravely wronged you. (In Trump’s case, he’s confusing being wronged with being held accountable. But he’s convinced himself that he’s been horribly mistreated.)

[Nick Clegg: Getting too close to Trump was a mistake]

Too many churches preach what I’d call “cheap forgiveness,” a cousin of what the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Forgiveness takes time, and it should. Forgiving someone instantly usually means you haven’t yet reckoned with the pain. We have to make space to process the grief, anger, and trauma of suffering a deep injustice. That’s why “forgive and forget” is such bad advice. The Christian psychiatrist Curt Thompson argues that it gets things backward: Real forgiveness requires remembering. That means deliberately revisiting the hurt, ideally with others, until the memory is reshaped rather than suppressed.

Cheap forgiveness is also a form of enabling. It lets the person who did the damage off the hook. When forgiveness comes too fast and with no cost, it can tell them that what they did wasn’t so bad after all. It lets them skip remorse, stunts their capacity for genuine empathy, and reinforces a sense of impunity.

But Trump wasn’t simply acknowledging that forgiveness is hard. He seems to regard forgiveness as unnecessary at best and a sign of weakness at worst. For one thing, he has said he isn’t sure he’s ever asked God for forgiveness. “I don’t bring God into that picture,” he once explained. For another, he has turned the National Prayer Breakfast into a stage for denouncing his political opponents as “dishonest” and “corrupt.” He has preached vengeance at a gathering that, until Trump, had been a bipartisan refuge of reconciliation and generosity of spirit.

BUT WHAT WAS MOST REVEALING about the 60 Minutes interview was how openly Trump owned the hatred at the core of who he is. He seemed almost proud of its depth and intensity. More than any other force, even his narcissism, hate seems to drive him. It fuels his posts on Truth Social. It explains his hunger for power. It feeds his obsessions. It bleeds into his every interaction. And it works on him like a drug: The more he indulges it, the more he craves it. Not even the deaths of men he considered enemies—John McCain, Rob Reiner, Robert Mueller—can satisfy his venom. When Mueller died in March, Trump’s response was, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

It has also crowded out joy. It’s hard to recall Trump ever seeming truly happy. And it leaves no room for intimacy, because anyone close to him might one day become an enemy. Hate often does its deepest damage to the one who carries it. In the end, it corrodes the soul of the hater.

Trump’s hatred has also corroded the soul of his party. It’s striking how much the Republican Party—and how much of the Christian right—has come to resemble him during the Trump era. We see it in the brutal personal attacks, the proud displays of cruelty, and the delight in watching the strong hurt the weak. The party that for decades championed family values, law and order, and the formation of virtue and character in the young has become Castle Rock, Jack’s stronghold in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It’s a place of violent tribal loyalty, where power comes from force and hatred is a badge of belonging.

[Peter Wehner: A good night for the Christian faith]

Last week, the GOP’s Castle Rock was breached. People who practice the politics of love crushed those who embody the politics of hate. It will take time for Castle Rock to collapse. But collapse it will, and so will the man who built it.

IT WAS NOT TRUMP’S FIERCEST CRITICS but Trump himself who said, in effect, that he would choose hate and hell over love and heaven. That calls to mind C. S. Lewis’s line in The Problem of Pain that “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” Lewis meant that people choose hell because they prefer their own will and pride. They would rather cling to their grievances and grudges, their self-pity and their enmity, than let them go, even to God.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain,” the novelist, essayist, and civil-rights activist James Baldwin wrote. The pain beneath Trump’s hatred may well be enormous. Under different circumstances, he might be a tragic figure. But because he has inflicted so much pain on so many, especially the weak and the vulnerable, and has delighted in their suffering, he is instead a malevolent figure. His indelible legacy, and his movement’s, will be disgrace and dishonor.