The Nancy Kerrigan Principle

Years ago, I learned an important lesson. Raised in an American culture that still retained a lot of Christian assumptions (as that “God sides with underdogs”: a belief that is still fundamental to everybody on the left side of the spectrum and is now profoundly rejected by the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism) I took it as axiomatic that to be a victim was to be somehow immune from also being a jerk.

Then Tonya Harding engineered her assault on Nancy Kerrigan. I was, of course, on Kerrigan’s side. She was clearly a victim and Harding was an obvious villain.

But then, when the Olympics came along, Kerrigan was caught on a hot mic being an absolute gossiping bitch to her competitors. Here was new data I had never computed before: “Just because you are a victim does not mean you can’t be a jerk too!”

Revelation! (Yes. I *am* slow on the uptake. Your point?)

Anyway, I don’t think its a bad thing to have a posture of empathy toward people. Although I believe in original sin and have never met a human being who did not express their sinful selfishness in one way or another, I am also acutely aware that we are all (precisely for that reason) also victims of somebody else’s sins and that this leaves us all traumatized to one degree or another. So pity and empathy are required if we are to understand what is going on.

The trouble comes when we extend empathy *only* to people who remind us of ourselves and never learn to extend empathy to anybody who is not an extension of our ego.

This is what the MAGA Cult habitually does. Trump mimics the victimhood of real victims. Who has not felt the pain of being excluded from the Cool Kid’s Table? Lots of victims of bullying and exclusion walk the face of the earth and Jesus calls us to care about and befriend them. It’s a perfectly Christian instinct.

But there are those who are excluded, not because they are victims, but because they are selfish bullies and aggressors who pose a grave danger to others. Trump and his Cult are among these. He gives them moral permission to reserve their empathy to themselves and to bully, abuse, terrorize and hurt anybody in their way, all while feeling nothing but pity for themselves as victims who are excluded.

Howard Stern, of all people, accurately diagnosed Trump as a man given every gift life could hand him who dislikes his own most devoted followers and feels perpetually outside and excluded because he could never break into the social circles of those he endlessly envies as the Cool Kids Table. He surrounds himself with adulators who are themselves socially inept and repellent people, but is never happy with their company because he can never get enough of what he doesn’t really want. Figures like Musk and Kid Rock and similar repellent humans flatter him, but their very association with him makes them unpopular and he knows it. So he perpetually chases after, envies, and can never have friendships with those he deeply longs to have as peers. So he is stuck hanging around a base of people he deeply regards as beneath him, listening to their adoring flattery while deriving no nourishment from it. He would betray them all in a heartbeat if he could have real acceptance from those whose respect he truly craves.

The result of this dynamic?

That would be harmless to the rest of us if he only did that. But since he can’t have the respect of the glitterati, he tries to fill the hole with money, pleasure, power, and the honor of the worst people on earth. And that is already on track to kill millions of people in the developing world. Whether it kills millions more of us (as his handling of COVID did) remains to be seen. Threats like this suggest that he means it to climax, not with pathetic tweets, but with concentration camps and death to anyone who offends him:

Trump is, in many ways, a victim (particularly of his evil father). But just because he is a victim does not mean that he cannot be a monster too. Hitler was also a victim. Being a victim is something everybody experiences. It does not absolve us from our sins. Only the blood of the Victim who is also the Judge can do that–and only if we repent our sins. And we have it on good authority that he does not accept self-pity as an excuse for impenitent, gratuitous cruelty to the least of these.

Nor will he accept it from the Greatest Christians of All Time who have whored themselves out to the dimestore antichrist in return for his promises of vengeance on those they hate.