Az Me Darf a Gonef

My father was a hotelman. He often relied on unreliable employees who either did not show up for work, got drunk, or were dishonest. He would stand by the window watching employees sneak off the premises with towels or food from the kitchen hidden in laundry baskets. The aggravation never ended, yet he needed them to run the hotel.

One day, in youthful innocence, I asked him, “Dad, why don’t you just fire the ones that are dishonest or don’t show up?”

He looked back at me wistfully and said, “Duvid, Az me darf a ganef, nemt men im fun der tlie.”

“If one needs a thief, one takes him from the gallows.”

These marginal employees often lasted only until payday, when they inevitably got drunk or disappeared, leaving the kitchen and dining room short staffed. Dad would find himself back in the kitchen cooking, washing dishes, and mopping floors. The philosophy that sounded so practical in the moment simply kicked the proverbial can down the road. It solved nothing permanently, but it functioned long enough to get through the rush season.

America made a similar Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.

Many Americans believed he would cure the ills he railed against: inflation, unemployment, foreign wars, uncontrolled immigration, jobs lost to globalization, and institutions they believed had abandoned or humiliated them. Some were hanging on economically while working two jobs. Others watched manufacturing towns collapse after decades of trade deals that exported jobs to countries with cheap labor. Many believed cultural elites looked down on them as backward, disposable, or irrelevant.

Trump understood that anger better than his opponents did.

To his supporters, he was not merely a politician. He was a battering ram. A man willing to fight institutions they believed no longer represented them. They overlooked the vulgarity, the dishonesty, the chaos, because they believed only someone outside the accepted rules could break a system they thought was already corrupted against them.

In their minds, they were cutting the thief down from the gallows because they needed him.

And, in fairness, some of the administration’s policies did address real concerns. Illegal immigration was reduced. NATO allies were pressured to spend more on defense. Iranian proxies were weakened. The administration projected strength in ways many Americans found reassuring after years of drift and uncertainty.

But the bargain carried costs that grow more visible by the day.

We have watched a kaleidoscope of ethical evasions, loyalty tests, self dealing, and assaults on institutional norms. A President increasingly treating the machinery of government as personal property. An Attorney General viewed by critics less as guardian of the Constitution than as personal counsel to the man who appointed him. The line between public duty and private protection has become dangerously blurred.

Yet if one opposes this administration only with outrage and moral superiority, one learns nothing.

Economic dislocation is real. Cultural humiliation is real. The anger of people who believed themselves abandoned by political, financial, and media elites is real. A democracy that ignores those realities creates conditions in which citizens become willing to make dangerous bargains.

That may be the enduring lesson of Faust.

Faust thought the devil would bail him out of a universe of despair. Americans, too, sought a solution for profound dissatisfaction — revenge against scornful elites, relief from insecurity, humiliation, economic fear, and the feeling that the people running the country neither understood nor respected them anymore.

But Goethe’s Faust obtained redemption not because he was innocent, but because he kept striving to be better. The damnation of eternal hell was avoided because Faust never stopped reaching beyond his own failures and illusions toward something higher than himself.

So, too, must we strive to blow past this dark chapter of our times.

Not merely by condemning one man, however deserving of condemnation he may be, but by understanding how millions of Americans came to believe that cutting the thief down from the gallows was their only remaining choice.

Are things as bad as they seem?

May 2026.  Observations

People are thinking that Trump has lost his way. But that does not seem possible, because he never found it in the first place. For someone with his keen political instincts, it strikes me as not unusual that he has no moral compass, because voters either do not care or care only about themselves. This has been true many times throughout our history, but moral leadership, or at least a modicum of it, has existed to some extent among the elites.

If it is true that leaders do not possess some element of decency and respect for their countrymen, then we are doomed to fail. It almost seems that we are on the cusp of that, if one looks around. But maybe not. Even a crook makes some correct decisions. After all, Nixon went to China. Trump may solve part of the Middle East problem while he screws everything else up domestically.

American history teaches us that there have been moral lapses before: presidents who presided over the killing of Native Americans, who were segregationists, who were racists, who were slaveowners, who catered to robber barons. There were titans who built the railroads, cornered the oil markets, burned down their competitors, shot strikers — but often these lapses were followed by reform movements. Hopefully that will happen again after this dark chapter of corruption returns permanently to Mar-a-Lago or to Leavenworth. I believe the American voter will wake up from this nightmare.

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, has just written a new book, We the People, the premise of which is that the Constitution needs to be amended from time to time, and that the difficulty of amending it has thrown a monkey wrench into not only the efficiency, but more importantly, the fairness by which we govern ourselves.

A number of things must be done — the discarding of the Electoral College, and the direct election of the President of the United States. One person, one vote. One methodology would be awarding each state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, thereby avoiding the necessity of a national recount if there is controversy.

Next, proportioning the Senate more in line with population without abolishing the influence of each state — perhaps by adding senators in tiers and capping representation at six per state, so that the Senate does not simply become another House. Or alternatively, leaving the Senate alone but increasing the size of the House to create more equal representation. And stop gerrymandering through national legislation.  Moreover, institutions and lawmakers are not keeping up with vast technological change and upheaval.

Unfortunately, the conservative elements of society have vested interests in keeping things the way they are, even if that includes massive wealth inequality, raging corporate profits, and increasingly desperate economic conditions for the working class, soon to be run off the road by robots, literally and figuratively.

60 Minutes ran a piece this past Sunday night about immigrant truck drivers being disqualified from renewing their licenses. The piece made no mention of the fact that soon there may not be any truck drivers at all. Those 18-wheelers scaring the shit out of us, barreling down the middle of the expressway, will be piloted by more cautious robots, perhaps relegated to the extreme right lane as in Europe. No time pressure. No need to get to the next rest stop to sleep.

Americans are getting a rapid dose of the future, but lawmakers are struggling to keep up with it. The idea that a Terminator may someday come after us is frightening, but somehow we forget the past. There were frightening times then also: wars, famines, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu killing millions, the Cold War.

Surely we can survive a few years of an unscrupulous, narcissistic, self-enriching president who might occasionally make a correct call here and there. Even Chauncey Gardner got the flowers to bloom.