The Ends and the Means

When I speak these days to Trump supporters, I often hear the concession that ‘yes, Trump is a horrible braggart, and yes, he is terribly thin-skinned and confrontational, and yes, I wish he would tweet a little less, and yes, he is a philanderer and sexual predator (but so was Bill Clinton!), and yes, he has a multitude of character flaws’.  And then comes the ‘but’ – ‘But it may be that this country needs someone like Trump to fix the big problems it has’.

Other than a modest percentage of true believers, the support for Trump seems to be of the ‘ends justify the means’ variety.  I picture a nation of ‘cringing’ conservatives, aghast and embarrassed at what they have put into the white house and yet still doubling down on their full-throated support for his initiatives.

I recall Dave Barry once writing in a humor column that Republicans would elect an axe murderer if he promised to cut taxes.  Very prescient!  I don’t believe that Trump is necessarily evil in the sense that a serial killer is evil.  But I do believe he is a classic example of a leader who is so consumed by vanity and power that he no longer has any empathy for other points of view and that he will use his power ruthlessly in pursuit of his goals, which in the end are mainly about assuaging his profound insecurity.

At the heart of the Trump phenomenon lies one of the great questions of civilization – do the ends justify the means?  For conservatives, does the ‘end’ (various rollbacks of liberal policies, tax cuts, a bellicose foreign policy - no more apologizing, i.e. no more empathy!) justify the ‘means’ (Trump’s legitimation of the basest human traits in leadership and diplomacy, alienation of large segments of the U.S. and world populations, his astonishing lack of civility).  Human societies have always wrestled with this quandary.

I confronted this dilemma when I worked for Habitat for Humanity International in its early phases (1986-1988).  I had come in to set up their computer systems but soon found myself running their fundraising and publicity departments as well.  The primary means of obtaining funds for HFH’s work was through direct mail.  Habitat had recently been fortunate to have Jimmy Carter join its board and become a strong advocate of its work.  He had agreed to lend his name to fundraising letters for the work. 

The direct mail firm we used did an aggressive campaign of ‘acquisition’ letters to large mailing lists.  These mailings cost hundreds of thousand of dollars and were a substantial part of the funds we had for operation each year.  However, from an accounting point of view, we could amortize the cost of the mailings over the ‘lifetime’ of the donors, which could be estimated at 5 years or more.  Thus, our % of fundraising costs in terms of our overall budget that appeared on our annual report allowed us to be graded well by various watchdog agencies for charitable organizations.

Many of our employees and volunteers were deeply disillusioned by these mailings, which had all the typical slick marketing characteristics.  The fact that we were spending incredible amounts of money to obtain donors seemed antithetical to the values of HFH and the people who supported it.  Habitat was still a very small organization with a strong sense of family. It seemed a betrayal of the uniquely simple, non-commercial message of Habitat.

However, direct mail was how Millard Fuller, Habitat’s founder, had made his millions before he gave them all away and started HFH.  Millard was passionate about the mission of Habitat and if millions of Jimmy Carter direct mail pieces could accelerate the growth dramatically, then there was no question we would embrace it.  So, rather than allow Habitat’s growth to occur more slowly and organically, we drove ahead with massive mailings.

The questions abound.  Did the end – Habitat’s meteoric growth – justify the means – the use of fundraising techniques that sparked a loss of innocence and the change in character of Habitat?  Would Habitat have changed anyway?  Is such change inevitable in any successful endeavor?  If more people received houses because of these mailings wasn’t it worth it?  Or perhaps the preservation of Habitat’s unique character was more important and more impactful than being able to build more houses.

Using questionable means to achieve an end cannot always be easily evaluated at the time of the decision.  Was the use of the atomic bomb on Japan a good decision?  In the emotional extremes of WWII it was readily accepted. War is a time when these types of ends-versus-means decisions – the calculus of the so-called greater good – are made over and over again.  Were the allies right (apart from the more basic question of morality . . . ) to massively bomb civilian targets in Germany and Japan to ‘break the will’ of the people?  Should we torture people and deny them all civil and legal rights in the name of anti-terrorism?  Doesn’t each new concession to more horrible ‘means’, even if the ‘end’ is a noble goal, create a downward spiral of precedent and example that is bound to wreak future havoc and horror?

And so here we are with President Trump.  The man cannot let a day go by without ridiculing or threatening someone via Twitter, or bragging shamelessly about his so-called accomplishments (methinks thou doth protest too much Donald!).   Even if he is successful in accomplishing certain goals for the Republican party, will anyone be happy with the long term consequences of his presidency?  Will civility have been dealt a death blow?  Will childish antics become the norm among politicians and businesspeople?  Will children grow up embracing the kind of nonsense that is his modus operandi and see themselves justified in all types of anti-social behavior?

There are many examples of how one can become numb to horrible things, inured to bad behavior, jaded by idiotic acts.  The biggest danger of Donald Trump is not his policies, as repugnant as they may be, but rather the possibility that we may in the end lose our sense of outrage and allow him to undermine our code of ethics and morality.  No, my dear Republican friends, the ends do not justify the means!