They Are Different From You and Me

There are a couple of things I wanted to comment on this morning. The first is President Trump’s remarks about the limits of his global power reported by Isabela Murray and Michelle Stoddart at ABC News:

President Donald Trump reportedly told The New York Times that his “own morality” serves as the thing that could potentially limit his global powers — adding that he doesn’t “need international law.”

As part of a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times published Thursday, Trump was asked Wednesday whether there were any limits to his global powers.

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump reportedly said to The New York Times.

That highlights why I have never voted for Donald Trump. He inhabits a different world from the rest of us. I think the Japanese have a word for it—betsu sekai, a separate world. F. Scott Fitzgerald put it well in The Rich Boy:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

That applies just as well to John F. Kennedy as to Donald Trump. They can never really understand us and vice versa and, importantly, we can’t just rely on their good will and good judgment. In a constitutional system built on external restraints including laws, institutions, and norms, any leader who believes only his own conscience limits him is already operating outside the system’s logic. Trump is dangerous because he is unbounded and morally under-equipped.