Poisonous Trump infected our neighbors — they're now jerks

Friends,

I was driving my car yesterday, heading home after doing some errands, when someone ran a red light and just about hit me. I swerved to avoid him, then stopped my car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road screaming at the vanishing a--hole and giving him the finger.

Are drivers becoming more belligerent, or am I becoming grouchier?

Not just drivers. A few days ago, I was waiting in line at a bakery when someone broke in line ahead of me without even a “Please excuse me.” I tapped him on the shoulder and told him in no uncertain terms to get back in line.

Is our civic life becoming more brutish, or am I becoming angrier about it?

I’ve been seeing more people dump their trash on the street, and telling them to stop. I’m watching parents scream at their kids with a ferocity I’ve rarely witnessed before, and occasionally I suggest they treat their kids better. My neighbor has started using a loud power tool in the evening, and I’ve asked him to keep it down.

I’m aware of more shoving and pushing — in a department store, at a local restaurant, at an airport — which p---es me off. I hear more people using racial, ethnic, and sexist insults, which I just won’t tolerate. Yesterday’s errands included a stop at the neighborhood Safeway, where someone called the cashier a “b---h.” I told him he shouldn’t say that.

Are such small acts of bullying on the rise, or am I becoming less tolerant of them?

Okay, maybe I am turning into a grouchy old man. But there’s another old man in the White House who has lowered the moral tone of the nation. His selfish, bigoted belligerence has signaled to America that it’s okay to disregard social norms in pursuit of whatever you want.

He’s signaled it’s okay to disregard norms, not just in social interactions but in the system as a whole.

CEOs of hugely profitable firms are now laying off large numbers of workers — not because they have to, but because they figure they can make even more money that way. Until recently, highly profitable corporations didn’t do mass layoffs; it was considered bad form.

A Wall Street Journal story calls the past few months “the era of the mega-layoff,” citing Amazon’s recent reduction of its workforce by 30,000 and Oracle’s laying off many thousands of its employees. As the Journal reports,

“Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.”

Wall Street, meanwhile, is investing in crypto and private credit, in apparent disregard for the dangers they pose to the financial system. It’s as if the Street is saying: Who cares, if there’s money to be made?

We’re in a wave of selfish assertiveness even worse than the “greed is good” days of Gordon Gekko.

Trump is not singularly responsible for every such breach of public morality, of course. But a president inevitably influences the character of a nation. We’re continuously bombarded by how he acts, what he says and does, the ways he treats others, his style, his attitude.

Trump behavior is disgusting.

This coarsening of American life should be counted among the myriad ways Trump has worsened America.

I for one am going to resist this degradation of our civic life, even if it earns me a reputation of being an old grouch.

Even if it makes me one.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org