About the Book
This is a quest to understand the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. How did a candidate with multiple criminal convictions, felony indictments, judicial findings of sexual assault, public allegations of sexual misconduct, and a longtime associations with Jeffrey Epstein, receive such popular support?
The focus of this book is on individual and collective morality. I opine that most citizens have moral restraints that are dissonant with Trump’s known and alleged moral and legal transgressions.
As an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice, this was flummoxing. I chose social psychology theoretical paradigms as explanatory frameworks. I used moral disengagement and cognitive dissonance theories during my academic career to explain how violent offenders harmed their victims.
Individuals continue to exonerate Trump’s moral and legal transgressions. They made a Faustian Bargain, trading morality for profit and power. This bargain created a morality crisis that compromises the heart and soul of our nation.
Epilogue/Afterword
Donald Trump recently celebrated his first year in office as a second-term President of the United States. February 24, 2026, is the day he will deliver the first State of the Union Address as a second-term president.
Dismality is an appropriate term to describe the current state of our union. Deportation policies primarily focus on brown-skinned immigrants held in hastily constructed detention centers. This system is rife with allegations of abuse, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions and preventable deaths and medical neglect. And yes, they are separating families. These policies parallel the internment of Japanese Americans during the 1940s, which is perceived as a national disgrace.
The inhumane ideological fueled policies create a divide in our national consciousness. It creates a morality crisis that tears our souls apart. While predictable, the level of callousness was incomprehensible when I began writing this book.
Hundreds of references in the Epstein files haunt President Trump. Revelations of his association with Jeffrey Epstein are growing stronger every day. Recent reporting suggests serious deviance. Bombshell reports regularly expose one of the greatest criminal coverups in our nation’s history. A former United States senator said the Epstein coverup makes Watergate look like child’s play!
Our country is essentially at war with Iran. Precise political goals seem imprecise and undefined. Tensions in the Middle East could not be higher. Discussions surround placing American troops on the ground as escalation seems certain.
In a time of duplicity and dismalness, there is a reason for optimism. Our nation always rebounds from existential threats. Grace and human dignity will guide us through the monumental morality crisis threatening our national consciousness.
Preface
This book is a journey and a quest to understand an extraordinary event in my life and the essence of our country. It is a search for a critical explanation of the moral standards challenged by a crisis that is decimating our nation’s moral fabric. This is not a heated, subjective ideological discussion commonly found around dining room tables.
Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States began this journey in 2016; it became a priority for me in 2025 when voters re-elected him. A jury convicted him of 34 felonies, and the House of Representatives impeached him twice. He faced an additional 52 serious felony grand jury indictments. Two separate juries in civil trials found him liable for sexually assaulting a woman. Robson (2020) found that, over the years, the number of women who alleged sexual misconduct against him reached as high as 67. There is evidence that he had connections with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who ran an elaborate sex trafficking operation that involved the sexual assault and statutory rape of hundreds of minor girls.
As a young Appalachian man from West Virginia, I learned moral standards that influenced many aspects of my life. My father and three brothers, who fought in three different wars, taught me valuable lessons about patriotism. I attended their funeral services and still remember the haunting sound of a military bugler playing “Taps” at each of their gravesites.When I was drafted during the Vietnam War, I could not dishonor my family by dodging the draft.
I worked as a railroad police officer for a couple of years and served as a police officer with the Marietta, Ohio, Police Department for approximately three years and three months. I faced some of the most dangerous situations in my life, including several sexual assault investigations involving female victims. I responded to domestic calls where women were seriously injured; these experiences were among the most perilous I encountered. As an officer, I either arrested or attempted to arrest the men who committed these assaults.
Enforcing legal violations was a routine part of being a police officer. Admittedly, I likely arrested several hundred people for misdemeanor offenses and several for felony violations. While I cannot recall exact figures, I likely issued several hundred traffic citations. I physically arrested drunken drivers who were so intoxicated that they could barely walk.
During my time as a police officer, I aimed my .38-caliber service revolver on offenders a few times. Fortunately, I gained control without using lethal force. More than once, my finger was on the trigger in single action; one mistake or misperception could have been catastrophic. I have never forgotten that feeling. I resorted to physical force with a nightstick, injuring men who resisted arrest and attempted to assault me. In one case, the offender’s potential death left me with an aching feeling, but fortunately, he lived to see another day.
Throughout nearly fifty years as a university professor, I dedicated myself to teaching and conducting research in criminology and criminal justice, concentrating on homicide and violent predatory crime. Naturally, my curriculum included discussions on sexual assault against women and children, addressing the long-term and short-term physical and psychological effects that can reach debilitating proportions.
During my career as a professor, I occasionally taught human relations courses to police cadets in the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice. I also served as an instructor for in-service training programs in the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice and the Ohio Peace Officers Training Academy. The social significance of police officers is often unrecognized, unappreciated, and misunderstood. I strongly support the police function, but am unhesitant in addressing police wrongdoing critically. All police departments require their officers to uphold the United States Constitution, as well as federal and state laws. Disciplinary procedures routinely hold officers accountable for violations, which often result in termination and/or criminal charges.
Despite his extensive history of moral and legal violations, voters elected Donald Trump as President of the United States on November 5, 2024. I became bewildered. His record of transgressions would have automatically disqualified him from being a police officer at accredited agencies; he likely could not pass a background investigation or a polygraph examination. His elitist status may have enabled him to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. After nearly a year in office, his administration repeatedly trampled on the United States Constitution.
Currently, there are allegations that Defense Secretary Hegseth committed serious war crimes (Atwood, 2025).
The election of Donald Trump challenged the essence of my career in criminal justice and criminology. His record of moral and legal transgressions is antithetical to the constructs of my moral framework. His notion of patriotism directly contradicts my family’s record of service to this country. Why does he label veterans as losers when I did not resist being drafted during the Vietnam War? Why do people view Trump loyalists as patriotic while completely marginalizing my military service? Why did I work as an underpaid police officer and risk my life to protect and serve others? Was teaching students the value of the United States Constitution an exercise in futility? Why did I pursue a Ph.D. and commit to public service when easier endeavors would have been more financially lucrative?
This project is a search for answers to the fundamental questions that arose during a conversation with three of my highly respected criminology colleagues, who are also emeritus professors in the field. We started by asking how a candidate with such an extensive history of criminogenic and morally transgressive behavior became President of the United States. What existing theoretical and analytical frameworks could explain such an important social phenomenon? How did so many voters support a candidate whose moral transgressions were dissonant with their own moral structures?
I authored this project to answer these fundamental questions. The analytical framework I used includes social cognitive theory, particularly Albert Bandura’s Moral Disengagement Theory and Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which offer powerful explanations for this phenomenon.
Ultimately, I conclude that members of voting blocs needed a person morally situated to transgress moral standards. An autocratic president willing to be dishonest, lie, spread misinformation, and systematically use government propaganda—much like Joseph Goebbels did under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich—facilitated the achievement of ideological goals, political power, and substantial profits.
I will discuss this level of immorality throughout the book, as it serves a purely transactional purpose. It is a symbiotic relationship that provides supporters with justifications and rationalizations that enable disengagement from the moral constructs that typically serve to self-condemn and inhibit the conduct they support in the Trump presidency.
This is a Faustian bargain, requiring individuals to sell their moral standards to achieve the transactional goals sought in this relationship. The negative externalities of this arrangement have created a moral crisis that threatens the heart and soul of our democracy.
Sample Morality Scale
1 = Strongly Disagree 2 = Disagree 3 = Neither Agree or Disagree 4 = Agree 5 = Strongly Agree
- An adult male should have permission to touch a nonconsenting woman’s vagina or breasts.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok for an adult male to have sex with a 17-year-old girl in a paid prostitution arrangement.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is appropriate for an adult male to have sex with girls between the ages of 13 and 15.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is appropriate for an adult male to have sex with high-school-aged girls.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok to deliberately tell lies that are harmful to other people.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is okay to defraud others for financial gain.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is okay for a presidential candidate deliberately to tell harmful lies for political advantage.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok for a sitting president to take part in an organized effort designed to overthrow an election.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok for a former president to possess secret and confidential government documents unlawfully.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is okay for a presidential candidate to pay hush money illegally to conceal a sexual relationship from the voting public.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is okay to physically assault a police officer.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is okay for a president to issue a pardon for individuals convicted of assaulting a police officer.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok for adults to maintain social friendships with men who they know, or should know, routinely commit statutory rape of minor girls.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok for extremely wealthy men to have sex with girls under the age of 16 years old.
1 2 3 4 5 - It is ok for wealthy people who commit felonies to be treated more leniently than low income citizens who commit the same crimes.
1 2 3 4 5