oh yeah morals and law are his specialities https://t.co/bt4q1D6YkJ— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 25, 2019
That's all Trump understands, and look how well he's done with that!
I haven't read this Atlantic article, but I don't intend to. Take it from me (I have the experience!), you can overthink a subject. I put this (based solely on the tweet, mind! I'm not being fair) in the category of all the articles that try to "understand" and even convert "Trump supporters" (as if they re a unified category, like Boomers or Millennials. Magical thinking trumps all!). It's as if Trump is an evil power who cannot be defeated unless all of his sources of power are eliminated. But you aren't going to convert Trump voters to support Warren or Sanders or even Buttigieg or Biden, and it's a mug's game to try. Trump's base isn't that large, and isn't that important, and certainly isn't influential. They're entire weltanschaaung is built on their lack of influence. They don't need no steenken' influence! They've got Trump in the White House!
And, as I say, you can see how well that's working out for them.
Most Trump supporters have no idea what "natural law foundations" even means (and unless you're connecting it to Aquinas, you don't, either); nor do they care. There are probably a few Opus Dei members who think they understand it (they probably don't) or that Jefferson and Franklin were secretly Thomistic scholars (yeah, right!), and Adams and Madison and Hamilton were all quietly RC (again: right!), but the idea is ludicrous on its face. Arguing the idea might be fun for people with too little knowledge and too much unwillingness to admit democracy is a rowdy, brawling business (debating the finer points of "natural law" is so much more dignified!), but it has about as much contact with reality as Trump's latest ravings that he's both removing troops from the "Middle East" (get him to name the countries in that region) or that we're getting the oil (it's a global commodity, not a U.S. possession. This isn't the 19th century anymore.).
Politics is about power and who wields it. Trump's supporters don't know Machiavelli from Thomas Moore, or Thomas Moore from Thomas Hobbes, and they don't care. And as far as "natural law foundations," they think that means the laws that protect them, and punish their enemies, real and perceived. Again, Trump is the icon and the model in this regard: he means it when he derides the "human scum" he thinks plague his life now. He's not speaking in metaphors or trying to recover a lost age of imagined intellectual soundness.
He's just selfish and venal; and most of his supporters are responding to that, and nothing more.
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