What makes Donald Trump so unbearable isn’t merely that he’s cruel. Depravity can be named, challenged, fought back against. What makes him intolerable is how empty he is, how profoundly excavated, how untouched by the basic elements that make someone human. He isn’t animated by belief or conviction or even ideology in any meaningful sense. He’s animated by appetite. By grievance. By a cavernous absence where a self should have formed long ago.

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Republicans and Trump voters have grown fluent in avoidance, adept at the choreography of looking away. They didn’t see the post. They didn’t hear the implication. They missed the context. They were busy. They needed more information. They always seem to arrive just after the moment when a moral response is required, and somehow just in time to excuse its absence. This isn’t misunderstanding. It’s cultivation. A carefully maintained blindness that allows harm to pass through unchallenged, again and again, without ever touching their conscience.

They don’t even bother to dignify it with a defense. They let it pass as background noise. As how things are. As the cost of doing business in this moment. But what it really is — is moral retreat, the slow, deliberate shrinking of responsibility until nothing is left but a shrug. It’s how people who insist they are devout, righteous, God loving, values driven Christians manage to stay silent while brutality is sanctified in their name. It’s how a movement convinces itself that looking away is not just acceptable, but virtuous.

And the most dangerous lie they keep offering, over and over, is that this is merely a difference in style, or politics, or taste. That it’s just rhetoric. Just tone. Just Trump being Trump. It isn’t.