By Their Fruits

This piece ran in the newspapers in April, 2025.

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Preamble: Is it appropriate to comment so often on this one person – Donald Trump – as I have over recent years? I believe so, and for three central reasons:

1) No person in our history—not even those giants on Mt. Rushmore—has had as great an impact on our nation;
2) He’s been able to have that impact only because so many people believe Trump to be their hero.
3) The role Trump is actually playing is the opposite of heroic.

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Previously here I’ve written about Donald Trump’s extraordinary combination of genius and stupidity. But I have come to believe that in human affairs, there is a level more fundamental than either—something that might be called “the spirit” of a person, or a civilization, which reveals its essence. And with Trump, both the genius and the stupidity seem consistently to bear the same fruit.

Trump’s genius has enabled him to seriously damage the Rule of Law beyond what experts in such matters thought possible. Caught red-handed committing serious crimes to overturn an election, Trump managed to escape nearly unscathed from the efforts of very capable people to hold him accountable. His apparent profound understanding of the electorate enabled him to gain the power to sweep the law aside. Once President, Trump again showed an uncanny grasp of the weaknesses in the America of our times—including how to turn a whole political party into his obedient slaves—that allowed him to blow past the constitutional limits to presidential powers in a blizzard of illegal actions. Now, Trump even openly defies the Supreme Court.

While the ending to this story remains unwritten, his particular gifts might prove sufficient to destroy a historical treasure—America’s Rule of Law—leaving him unfettered at the top of the power system.

If his genius has enabled him to inflict potentially fatal damage to our “nation of laws, not of men,” it seems that Trump’s stupidity is inflicting serious wounds upon the American and world economies. In a manner that substantiates people’s characterization of Trump as “ineducable,” on the subject of tariffs he seems utterly captivated by notions that everyone with any knowledge of economics knows to be false. (He continues, for example, to declare that foreign nations will be paying money into the U.S. Treasury, though the obvious reality, of course, is that not one penny will be paid by foreigners.) Even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has condemned Trump’s reckless tariff policy. And The Economist says that, with his trade wars, “Trump has profoundly harmed the world economy. It will take time to rebuild what has been lost.”

This same pattern of destruction can be found in every other domain of Trump’s “hit the ground running” opening months of his new presidency. Take the “chainsaw” attack—by Elon Musk and DOGE—on a wide range of components of the federal government America has constructed over generations to meet the needs of a great nation. Whole agencies have been killed off—like one that helps save lives around the world (USAID)—and many others have been maimed, thousands of public servants lopped off without any proper deliberation (much less required legal procedures). There’s been damage to the lives of many dedicated public servants, and likely lasting damage to the nation’s well-being. This chainsaw massacre is being conducted in the name of “efficiency,” but there’s no evidence anything is being made more efficient. Instead, it looks like pure destruction—of institutions respected around the world (like the National Institutes of Health, the National Weather Service, the National Park Service)—damage which may never be fully repaired.

Trump’s conduct on the world stage expresses the same “spirit”: its through-line is destruction.
Friendly relations are turned to enmity—like the long-standing good relations with Canada, turned to powerful anger by Trump’s combination of threats and insults. Trump’s antagonizing of our long-time ally went so deep that the whole political alignment in Canada turned upside down almost overnight, with the Canadian electorate shifting toward the side most resolute in fighting back against the American President.

Meanwhile, our longtime friends in Europe quickly recognized that the leader of history’s greatest alliance—a mutual security pact among decent and democratic nations—had abandoned its enduring role as their leader. (A recent line in a respectable publication said that “the land of the free is now Europe.”) With Trump undercutting Ukraine, and moving to support the kind of tyranny and aggression that humankind had seemed to be overcoming, the damage to America’s reputation as a reliable ally in the quest for a better world will likely be enduring.
During these feverish opening months of the new Trump presidency, there has been nothing random about the consequences of his actions. (And the list could be expanded—like intensifying the chasm of polarization among the American people, and banning within government even the use of words like “climate change,” “solar,” and “safe drinking water.”) We can perceive the man’s essential spirit in the consistency with which he inflicts damage on the human world.

“By their fruits, one can know them,” says the Bible. And what this unbroken pattern of damage and demolition should make plain to every observer is this: Trump’s “spirit” is that of a Destroyer.