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.