I’m a 72-year-old, upper-middle-class married Jewish professional. As much as some progressives draw parallels to Germany in the 1930s, I don’t believe I’m in danger of roving gangs of skinheads pulling me and my wife out of our home and murdering us in camps. Although Donald Trump may yet wreck the economy and endanger my finances, I don’t believe I’m at risk of being driven into poverty, as so many others are. The most likely tangible impact that I may feel from Trump’s authoritarian agenda will be worsening climate change and the resulting damage to what remains of my life.
But like so many of my peers, I am acutely suffering under this reactionary authoritarian regime. And what I and so many others are suffering is not necessarily less important than objective economic exploitation and political oppression.
We are experiencing extreme moral injury, every single day.
So what do I mean by moral injury? That can happen when a soldier is ordered to torture, abuse or kill an enemy combatant or, worse yet, to harm civilians. Or when a drone operator learns, after an attack, that his drone killed several children. Or when a nurse administers a painful treatment to a terminally ill patient, knowing it is not likely to change the patient’s ultimate fate in any way. Or when, during the COVID pandemic, medical professionals were forced to make impossible choices due to resource shortages — to decide who got ventilators, to ration out protective equipment or to work in conditions they knew were unsafe for their patients or themselves.
Those situations, and others like them, are classic examples of moral injury. The individual afflicted feels guilt, shame and anger, but ultimately, and perhaps more important, feels — and is — objectively helpless to do anything about it. The nurse or the soldier in most such situations is not experiencing direct physical harm. The harm is psychic and moral, reflecting a conflict between deeply held ethical beliefs and behaviors that violate these beliefs, particularly behaviors over which one has little or no control.
This kind of suffering is real and has been repeatedly documented in medical literature. Moral injury has been described at times as “a betrayal of what’s right” or a “bruise on the soul.” Just as physical injuries have complex, long-term consequences, moral injuries also produce harm, experienced as guilt, shame, fear and anger, often directed at the self.
I believe that under Donald Trump, millions upon millions of people are enduring daily moral injuries that are extremely harmful to psychological well-being.
We need your help to stay independent
Under Trump and his cabal, we are living in a nation in which tremendous harm is being perpetrated against innocent people and groups who cannot defend themselves. Every day we see various forms of persecution, exploitation and oppression that violate our core values. The Trump administration sends innocent people to what amounts to concentration camps for no good reason. The systems that support and guarantee our health are being defunded or otherwise undermined. We see institution after institution forced to bow to the corrupt authority of this administration in ways that are horrifying and degrading, and that violate basic human dignity and decency. We see a narcissistic individual in the White House who is complicit in the slaughter of Palestinians in the Middle East, all while expressing skepticism about the evils of slavery and ordering the military occupation of multiple American cities.
Sometimes our moral torture seems to come slowly, one drop at a time. The Defense Department purges images, biographies and histories that reference the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo code talkers and baseball legend Jackie Robinson. In this same spirit, the administration reportedly ordered the removal of nearly 400 books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library, including works on the Holocaust, histories of feminism and civil rights, and Maya Angelou’s memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” while copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” were retained.
We live in a nation in which tremendous harm is being perpetrated against innocent people and groups who cannot defend themselves. Every day we see forms of persecution, exploitation and oppression that violate our core values.
Or these moral assaults can come at us more like a tidal wave, as with Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords, or the dramatic redistribution of wealth under the badly misnamed Big Beautiful Bill, with individuals who earn over $1 million a year projected to receive tax cuts averaging $97,000, while those earning $40,000 gain just $393.
Whether it’s the Department of Labor building draped with an enormous Trump portrait, with the secretary inviting the president, during a televised Cabinet meeting, to come see his ”big beautiful face,” or the saga of Kilmar Abrego García, who was returned to the U.S. from a cruel prison in El Salvador only to be threatened with arrest and a new plan to deport him to Uganda, one cannot go a day without feeling still more shame and helpless outrage at all these ignominious and dreadful actions.
Yet those of us who are not directly and immediately impacted, those of us who have, up to now, believed we lead safe and comfortable middle-class lives, go through our days, reading and hearing about the huge spectrum of suffering imposed by Trump and his cronies. The only slim ray of hope offered to us is the possibility of a better electoral outcome in 2026 or 2028.
Moreover, we endure moral distress in relative isolation, an additional painful reality that makes everything worse. We sometimes speak to each other, to our friends, and sometimes hear our sentiments echoed or elaborated by reporters, commentators or talking heads on TV. In the end, however, we go through this spectacle alone. We’re forced into a surreal double life — part of our selves tracking each new assault on democracy, while another part maintaining the fiction that life goes on as usual. We brush our teeth, drop our kids at school, attend Zoom calls and make dinner plans, all while apocalyptic headlines scroll through our devices and our minds. We share our horror in hushed tones with like-minded friends or find momentary solidarity in a columnist’s outrage, but mostly we’re left to process these events on our own.
Experiencing moral injury in isolation adds a vital element of trauma. We compartmentalize this grief and outrage into the corners of our private lives. Underneath that performance of normalcy, however, lies a deeper heartache, a deeper injury, that we keep carefully contained, sensing that if we let it fully surface, it might overwhelm us. Above all, we experience a pervasive miasma of helplessness as we are forced to watch this intolerable train wreck.
Such helplessness is an inevitable result of moral injury, and also serves to fuel and accelerate it. It is a highly toxic feeling, to which people respond in one of three ways, often unconsciously: 1) they find someone else they can victimize, and make feel make helpless (for instance, through child abuse or domestic violence), 2) they become depressed and sink into “learned helplessness” or 3) they try to push back with feelings of outrage and anger (such as road rage). As is true with most psychological suffering, the “solutions” to the problem of helplessness tend to lead to situations of greater pain and suffering.
Such is the nature of the moral injury we are experiencing.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Isn’t this a “First World problem,” a form of privileged whining or a self-indulgent bid for tea and sympathy? In some ways, yes, but only if we discount and delegitimize the lived experience and impact of psychological suffering. When someone is depressed, is highly anxious, is anorexic or has OCD or ADHD, do we dismiss these conditions as fraudulent excuses or flights from responsibility? If you’re human and have a scintilla of emotional and social intelligence, then you know that psychological and emotional suffering are serious and lead to real-world personal and social dysfunction.
We all are involved, all implicated and all in pain, whether we are farm workers seeking a better life who are being sent to detention camps, or middle-class professionals in the suburbs, cringing with shame and outrage.
It is, in fact, our capacity for empathy and connectedness that provide the channel, or the jet fuel, that make moral injury possible to begin with. We hear about a mother and child being kidnapped by ICE agents and deported, and we can, if we let ourselves, identify and empathize with the terror of that mother and child and perhaps even the unspeakable pain and loss felt by their family. We read about the deliberate starvation of thousands of Palestinians, the intentional attacks on food lines and hospitals and the huge number of child amputees in Gaza, and if we let ourselves wade into the waters of empathy, we may become entirely overwhelmed with all these voices of desperation and pain.
At the end of the day, we all are involved, all implicated and all in pain, whether we are farm workers seeking a better life who are being rounded up and sent to detention camps, or middle-class professionals in the suburbs, cringing with guilt, shame and helpless outrage.
The only experience that has at least temporarily alleviated my own personal moral distress is when I have joined in demonstrations with thousands of like-minded people, all of us sharing both our outrage and our solidarity. Anyone who has experienced and attempted to master trauma knows that being part of a group that shares your pain, and still believes that there is a way through it, a way to conquer it, is the single most healing experience that we can have.
I believe we need to get together — on the streets, and anywhere and everywhere else we can — not just to protest the flood of cruelty and political danger facing others, but to defend ourselves from the psychic and moral assaults of this administration and find ways to heal and fight back. That may be the only way we can survive the next few years, by coming together.
