Who are the good guys and the bad guys?

 People may tell what they did and what was done to them, they may tell their stories repeatedly in specific settings and formats, and they may produce a record of the telling. This approach accomplishes several goals. By creating new rituals, it gives voice to people who have not been heard in public. By focusing on the acts of telling and listening, it may challenge assumptions about justice as the act of meting out punishment. By involving a larger public, some of the people who work on collective trauma seek to address the issue of moral injury. In the framework of collective trauma, moral injury has been inflicted on society as a whole, not only on the victims but also on the perpetrators and the bystanders—not in the same way, to be sure, and not in equal measure, but it is all of society that has been injured. The goal of reckoning is moral restoration. 

Public rituals of telling the stories of the Trump era would be healing because they would ensure that people are heard. They would create accountability and transparency, not necessarily by handing out criminal punishment but by exacting a reputational cost that might keep people who lied for Trump away from prestigious fellowships, and people who worked with Trump and broke the law out of government and think tanks. Most important, they would force us to ask the question, What made the Trump presidency possible?

Gessen, Masha. Surviving Autocracy (p. xii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The stories being told about what is happening in the United States in 2025 as it moves from a democracy to an autocracy often get labeled as “political” stories when they just as easily could be labeled as moral stories.

In the moral stories told about this time, who are the good guys doing good things and the bad guys doing bad things? What behaviors are constructive and engaged in for positive benefits of all, and what behaviors are destructive and engaged in for the reasons of special interest?

In Buddhism one of the elements of the noble eightfold path is right action. In following this element of the eightfold path of right action one needs to know the difference between right actions and wrong actions. In autocracies the right actions are determined by the accumulation of power and control rather than the well being of the whole.

For peace it is very important to do the right thing even when it is hard.

What made the Trump presidency possible in answer to Gessen’s question is that many people chose to do the wrong thing. What were the factors that contributed to this bad decision? Name one or two.