The bruise on America's soul: Moral injury in the age of Trump

The bruise on America’s soul: Moral injury in the age of Trump
Our shared trauma is not imaginary. The Trump regime's cruelty is affecting all of us — but there's hope

By Michael Bader
Published September 20, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.

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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.

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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. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/20/the-bruise-on-americas-soul-moral-injury-in-the-age-of-trump/