Dogs are much better people than humans. I agree with everything here, but without any shared moral compass and with the new weapon of online hounding, I fear we lack the right instincts to mend our social fractures. Trump represents the rejection of social "niceties," as his fans might put it, or basic human decency and honor as many of us see it. I accept that he won the elections and I agree with some of his policies, but his telos is the law of the jungle, not the harmony of the pack. Whether our fragile and overstretched social order can withstand his rabid bravado and chaos remains to be seen. Along with many Americans I am mortified by this latest in a long line of reprehensible remarks. Sorry.😞
I love your apology at the end. 😊🙏🏻 Despite being, I think, several steps distanced from the miscreant — I imagine you are only a compatriot or a part of the democratic process that elected him while casting your vote for ANOther — your single word “Sorry” (in this context) does beautifully illustrate what Helen has set out. Thanks.
From personal experience, I find your linking here of the concepts of ‘sincere apology’ and ‘sincere forgiveness’ reminds me that we can choose to practise both silently within our own hearts in order to ‘reset’ our sense of ourselves as an essentially well-meaning, lovable yet fallible human being, in circumstances in which those who our consciences urge us to apologise to are already deceased or ‘lost’ to us in some other way. Thank you for this reminder.
Great piece. It's definitely a Catch-22. Apologies are necessary but no one is willing to apologize and no one is willing to forgive. It's a byproduct of a low trust society and the internet not being a safe place to grow.
I wish Trump was the kind of president that could admit a mistake, but he isn't. There's no material upside for him to do so and his base would see him as weak. Considering Trump is for Trump, that's not gonna happen.
I want to have hope that broader society will get sick of fighting each other so much that apologies and forgiveness become a cherished value again. Unfortunately, it might take a generation or two, if ever.
Early in your essay you wrote that Trump's revised statement about UK soldiers "functions as a reversal of his former statement in the case of the UK, but not an apology." Then later you refer to "Donald Trump’s apology for his statement about NATO allies".
I think you were right the first time: he reversed course but did *not* apologize. This is important for a lot of reasons (some of which you touch on in your post in discussing why apologies are important). Among other things, an apology is a sort of submission: it shows a consciousness that you were wrong. Fake and coerced apologies are, as you note, a common thing, but it is noteworthy here that Trump didn't *even* do that. Which makes his new statement, in my view, worth all the less.
But even more important, in my view, is this: I don't think that Trump has ever apologized since he came on the political scene 11 years ago. Perhaps I'm forgetting something (if so, tell me). But dominance and narcissism is so central to who he is that I feel like he can't, both politically—it would ruin what his base loves in him, his "fighting", which is mostly about his refusal to apologize even (or especially) when wrong—and psychologically. (I still think the core of Trump's lies about 2020 were not a desire for power, but just a sheer psychological break at the possibility of admitting he lost.) I think an apology—a real apology, not a unmarked reversal, but standing up and saying "I was wrong and I am sorry and I will try to do better in the future"—is something Trump is wholly incapable of. It's far from the only reason that he is such a malignant force in the world, but it's an important one, which is why I think your latter phrase quoted above matters. If he had apologized, he wouldn't be Trump: and the whole world would be better off.
But when I said "This is why Donald Trump’s apology for his statement about NATO allies matters and why his commitment to respecting the liberal democratic order of Western Civilisation and Western alliances matters more broadly" I was not saying that he had apologised or was committing to respecting that order. He's clearly not and I am saying he is not. I go on to say that the problem of not doing either is not confined to Trump. Is it not clear that I know he did not apologise? When someone says something matters, this is not the same as saying it is happening, is it? If someone says, for example, "Being careful about your finances matters" they are not saying, "You are careful about your finances." They are usually telling them they are not.
It's a linguistic point and I don't want to exaggerate the importance of one sentence. But I think that the case of being careful about your finances is different, because that is a category not a specific thing (being careful about your finances exists *in general*; you ought to practice it). I think to say that, e.g., "Harris's election victory matters" implies she won—maybe not prior to the election (when the Gricean implicature is strong enough to push it the other way), but certainly after the fact. Similarly, I think to say that "Donald Trump's apology matters" before he's said anything would be one thing (it would be discussing a hypothetical that may or may not come to pass), but to say it after he said something is to imply that what he said can be reasonably called an apology. I would respectfully suggest rephrasing the sentence "This is why Donald Trump’s failure to apologize for his statement about NATO allies matters and why his manifest lack of commitment to respecting the liberal democratic order of Western Civilisation and Western alliances matters more broadly".
No, I don’t think so. It’s embedded in a paragraph about him not having apologised and nobody else has misunderstood it. I am saying he needs to apologise. We should continue to expect and ask for this. But I’m not going to quibble on this point. It’s silly.
(By the by, my most recent essay on Substack wasn't about apologies per se, but it was an attempt to imagine how Trump's supporters—not Trump himself—might possibly admit they were wrong. You might be interested: https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/why-this-atheist-jew-thinks-that)
Thank you Helen. Another perfect piece uncovering what we all didn’t know before, yet found that we did know all along. I wondered if the two adult daughters have views on how to get children to say sorry. Your great examples from private to international life again show how a good understanding of universal mundane things in life can be marvellous. Mundane means commonplace, universally worldly and uninteresting. But you show how important and interesting and ethical, even spiritual, at every level it is to get universal ordinary things right.
I hope you’ll like my expanding on this theme: the importance of not ignoring (supposedly) uninteresting universal features of human life and relationship. It was a theme of my career in MH services. For example, focusing more on the client family’s life rather than dispensing diagnostic labels. For example, unpacking the 95 parts that are packaged together to be sold as Family Therapy, things that are mostly ordinary good practice for anyone who serves people professionally. Everyone assumes the 94 ordinary but essential parts are there and pushes their one specialist innovation as a new brand. There are few professors or journals of basic good practice.
As well as apologies, other examples of important universal mundane features of human life include privacy, feeling safe, kindness, and “unkindness” (as in asserting yourself or dealing with the ordinary bad behaviour of kids and adults), how to think and write well, dealing with formal situations, with informal situations, with social media (ie informal exchanges without face to face contact), how to team-up and so on.
So, for example, long before getting to state laws and rules about the sharing of more private spaces, it would be good to keep in mind how people universally need to feel safe and private. This is ordinary; it’s a human right. In some cultures we do that with solid locks on our external doors for when we’re in or out, along with more tokenistic locks on toilet doors to signal boundaries that anyone would ordinarily understand or negotiate: “Are you needing or can I go first? I’ll not be long?” Even strangers can and generally expect to negotiate who they share private space with. It’s a basic social skill, respect and teaming up. Generally, privacy and safety are well understood and people can sort it for themselves. No one is offended by these boundaries. Like saying sorry, it’s a normal thing for people of any kind or class to understand the need and ways to feeling safe and private. Remembering this ordinary bit of life and behaviour shows that the current fury and war over shared spaces is about a rather different conflict. Yes, the key again is sincerity not coercion.
Speaking of kindness and getting kids to behave, I’ve read Victoria Smith’s tour de force book “(Un)kind”. A universal feature like kindness should be shared by all and fairly applied for all. Her book shows this is not so; kindness is so culturally gender-coded that “be kind” entrenches unkindness and sexism. She uses a super example that incidentally makes my point well: ie “it’s the behaviour stupid”.
In 2021 the finance officers of the UK department store John Lewis approved a very large budget for one of their famous long adverts. But after its launch they quickly withdrew as reality hit home. The advert thoroughly celebrated a child’s uncontrolled delinquent behaviour and systematic trashing of a family home, sister and mother passively watching. The advert’s message was “Let Life Happen”. JL feared viewers might validly claim on their JL home insurance for JL’s such openly lauded self-inflicted vandalism. My point is that a quite ordinary focus on the bad behaviour would have stopped this costly advert from the outset. Please keep going on the mundane, Helen!
(If you’re puzzled about what on earth led to JL’s insane advert, you’ll need to watch it on YouTube: spoiler alert — ideology erased reality.)
I’ve an important lesson on bias to share. View that JL advert here first with sound muted : https://youtu.be/gJ3dua4F8T0. That’s what I did after reading VS’s book. Since then I’ve watched it with the sound.
Without the sound you miss what VS also doesn’t point out (purposely, perhaps, since it fits her argument better in that book). That is, the advert’s dancing-diva-video-music motif that clearly frames it as fun, tongue in cheek, not serious. Without the soundtrack, you just see the bad offensive behaviour not the dance performance. So (with VS ideas in your head) he looks vacant not the sultry diva. With the music, his mother and older sister are not passive offended bystanders, but a mildly, if naturally weary, amused audience of his creative performance.
The lessons I learned are not to cut corners in our research of original evidence or publications, to not cut corners in our critical thinking, and most importantly to watch for and value the artistic tone and framework that may not be explicit but says “this is art or humour not to be taken so seriously”. On the other hand, art and humour may still be smuggling cultural values through (for good or bad) that are worth looking at critically.
You make so many interesting points here, and I like the way you connect and also distinguish between public and private apologies. But I think expecting an actual apology from Trump is a pie-in-the-sky notion. The two key things he learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn, were: never admit you are wrong, and never apologize.* And you will notice that you have never heard him doing either of these two things.
The only tweet he is known to have admitted to regretting was his gratuitously vicious one about Kim Novak, during the 2014 Oscars. “Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!” he wrote, and when she read it backstage, it was one of the most mortifying moments of her life. She was 81 years old and had been very reluctant to attend, but friends had encouraged her; after this, she didn’t leave her house for months.
I’ve given some thought to what it is about this specific transgression that would prick his conscience so, when he has said and done far worse things with no remorse, and I can’t come up with a reason that explains it. I do remember thinking, though, when he announced his intention to run a year later, that the Kim Novak tweet alone would disgust enough people to make it impossible for him to secure the nomination. Hah. As Bob Dylan has written, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
*For anyone interested in finding out how Trump became what he is, I can’t recommend the film The Apprentice (2024) highly enough.
I don’t expect. I just point out what would be normal and ethical and that his behaviour is not.
Very often I am saying what should happen with little expectation of it happening. This is not idealism but maintaining an expectation in order to keep it clear that some person or, usually, movement is falling beneath it. It helps stop normalising things and helps people object ethically and for good reason.
Sorry,* I didn’t mean to suggest that you are foolishly unrealistic although that sort of is what I did, isn’t it? 🤔 It’s really very valuable to continue to point out that these things are abnormal, even if they are common.
You’re fundamentally pessimistic in that you see conflict and disagreement as the natural state of humanity; but you personally convey a highly positive attitude, and these two features do not commonly go together nowadays. It’s not very 21st century. This confuses some people but for others it’s an important part of your appeal.
Dogs are much better people than humans. I agree with everything here, but without any shared moral compass and with the new weapon of online hounding, I fear we lack the right instincts to mend our social fractures. Trump represents the rejection of social "niceties," as his fans might put it, or basic human decency and honor as many of us see it. I accept that he won the elections and I agree with some of his policies, but his telos is the law of the jungle, not the harmony of the pack. Whether our fragile and overstretched social order can withstand his rabid bravado and chaos remains to be seen. Along with many Americans I am mortified by this latest in a long line of reprehensible remarks. Sorry.😞
I love your apology at the end. 😊🙏🏻 Despite being, I think, several steps distanced from the miscreant — I imagine you are only a compatriot or a part of the democratic process that elected him while casting your vote for ANOther — your single word “Sorry” (in this context) does beautifully illustrate what Helen has set out. Thanks.
From personal experience, I find your linking here of the concepts of ‘sincere apology’ and ‘sincere forgiveness’ reminds me that we can choose to practise both silently within our own hearts in order to ‘reset’ our sense of ourselves as an essentially well-meaning, lovable yet fallible human being, in circumstances in which those who our consciences urge us to apologise to are already deceased or ‘lost’ to us in some other way. Thank you for this reminder.
Great piece. It's definitely a Catch-22. Apologies are necessary but no one is willing to apologize and no one is willing to forgive. It's a byproduct of a low trust society and the internet not being a safe place to grow.
I wish Trump was the kind of president that could admit a mistake, but he isn't. There's no material upside for him to do so and his base would see him as weak. Considering Trump is for Trump, that's not gonna happen.
I want to have hope that broader society will get sick of fighting each other so much that apologies and forgiveness become a cherished value again. Unfortunately, it might take a generation or two, if ever.
Early in your essay you wrote that Trump's revised statement about UK soldiers "functions as a reversal of his former statement in the case of the UK, but not an apology." Then later you refer to "Donald Trump’s apology for his statement about NATO allies".
I think you were right the first time: he reversed course but did *not* apologize. This is important for a lot of reasons (some of which you touch on in your post in discussing why apologies are important). Among other things, an apology is a sort of submission: it shows a consciousness that you were wrong. Fake and coerced apologies are, as you note, a common thing, but it is noteworthy here that Trump didn't *even* do that. Which makes his new statement, in my view, worth all the less.
But even more important, in my view, is this: I don't think that Trump has ever apologized since he came on the political scene 11 years ago. Perhaps I'm forgetting something (if so, tell me). But dominance and narcissism is so central to who he is that I feel like he can't, both politically—it would ruin what his base loves in him, his "fighting", which is mostly about his refusal to apologize even (or especially) when wrong—and psychologically. (I still think the core of Trump's lies about 2020 were not a desire for power, but just a sheer psychological break at the possibility of admitting he lost.) I think an apology—a real apology, not a unmarked reversal, but standing up and saying "I was wrong and I am sorry and I will try to do better in the future"—is something Trump is wholly incapable of. It's far from the only reason that he is such a malignant force in the world, but it's an important one, which is why I think your latter phrase quoted above matters. If he had apologized, he wouldn't be Trump: and the whole world would be better off.
But when I said "This is why Donald Trump’s apology for his statement about NATO allies matters and why his commitment to respecting the liberal democratic order of Western Civilisation and Western alliances matters more broadly" I was not saying that he had apologised or was committing to respecting that order. He's clearly not and I am saying he is not. I go on to say that the problem of not doing either is not confined to Trump. Is it not clear that I know he did not apologise? When someone says something matters, this is not the same as saying it is happening, is it? If someone says, for example, "Being careful about your finances matters" they are not saying, "You are careful about your finances." They are usually telling them they are not.
It's a linguistic point and I don't want to exaggerate the importance of one sentence. But I think that the case of being careful about your finances is different, because that is a category not a specific thing (being careful about your finances exists *in general*; you ought to practice it). I think to say that, e.g., "Harris's election victory matters" implies she won—maybe not prior to the election (when the Gricean implicature is strong enough to push it the other way), but certainly after the fact. Similarly, I think to say that "Donald Trump's apology matters" before he's said anything would be one thing (it would be discussing a hypothetical that may or may not come to pass), but to say it after he said something is to imply that what he said can be reasonably called an apology. I would respectfully suggest rephrasing the sentence "This is why Donald Trump’s failure to apologize for his statement about NATO allies matters and why his manifest lack of commitment to respecting the liberal democratic order of Western Civilisation and Western alliances matters more broadly".
No, I don’t think so. It’s embedded in a paragraph about him not having apologised and nobody else has misunderstood it. I am saying he needs to apologise. We should continue to expect and ask for this. But I’m not going to quibble on this point. It’s silly.
Fair enough. We'll agree to disagree. I appreciate the post as whole, and your work. Thank you.
(By the by, my most recent essay on Substack wasn't about apologies per se, but it was an attempt to imagine how Trump's supporters—not Trump himself—might possibly admit they were wrong. You might be interested: https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/why-this-atheist-jew-thinks-that)
Thank you Helen. Another perfect piece uncovering what we all didn’t know before, yet found that we did know all along. I wondered if the two adult daughters have views on how to get children to say sorry. Your great examples from private to international life again show how a good understanding of universal mundane things in life can be marvellous. Mundane means commonplace, universally worldly and uninteresting. But you show how important and interesting and ethical, even spiritual, at every level it is to get universal ordinary things right.
I hope you’ll like my expanding on this theme: the importance of not ignoring (supposedly) uninteresting universal features of human life and relationship. It was a theme of my career in MH services. For example, focusing more on the client family’s life rather than dispensing diagnostic labels. For example, unpacking the 95 parts that are packaged together to be sold as Family Therapy, things that are mostly ordinary good practice for anyone who serves people professionally. Everyone assumes the 94 ordinary but essential parts are there and pushes their one specialist innovation as a new brand. There are few professors or journals of basic good practice.
As well as apologies, other examples of important universal mundane features of human life include privacy, feeling safe, kindness, and “unkindness” (as in asserting yourself or dealing with the ordinary bad behaviour of kids and adults), how to think and write well, dealing with formal situations, with informal situations, with social media (ie informal exchanges without face to face contact), how to team-up and so on.
So, for example, long before getting to state laws and rules about the sharing of more private spaces, it would be good to keep in mind how people universally need to feel safe and private. This is ordinary; it’s a human right. In some cultures we do that with solid locks on our external doors for when we’re in or out, along with more tokenistic locks on toilet doors to signal boundaries that anyone would ordinarily understand or negotiate: “Are you needing or can I go first? I’ll not be long?” Even strangers can and generally expect to negotiate who they share private space with. It’s a basic social skill, respect and teaming up. Generally, privacy and safety are well understood and people can sort it for themselves. No one is offended by these boundaries. Like saying sorry, it’s a normal thing for people of any kind or class to understand the need and ways to feeling safe and private. Remembering this ordinary bit of life and behaviour shows that the current fury and war over shared spaces is about a rather different conflict. Yes, the key again is sincerity not coercion.
Speaking of kindness and getting kids to behave, I’ve read Victoria Smith’s tour de force book “(Un)kind”. A universal feature like kindness should be shared by all and fairly applied for all. Her book shows this is not so; kindness is so culturally gender-coded that “be kind” entrenches unkindness and sexism. She uses a super example that incidentally makes my point well: ie “it’s the behaviour stupid”.
In 2021 the finance officers of the UK department store John Lewis approved a very large budget for one of their famous long adverts. But after its launch they quickly withdrew as reality hit home. The advert thoroughly celebrated a child’s uncontrolled delinquent behaviour and systematic trashing of a family home, sister and mother passively watching. The advert’s message was “Let Life Happen”. JL feared viewers might validly claim on their JL home insurance for JL’s such openly lauded self-inflicted vandalism. My point is that a quite ordinary focus on the bad behaviour would have stopped this costly advert from the outset. Please keep going on the mundane, Helen!
(If you’re puzzled about what on earth led to JL’s insane advert, you’ll need to watch it on YouTube: spoiler alert — ideology erased reality.)
I’ve an important lesson on bias to share. View that JL advert here first with sound muted : https://youtu.be/gJ3dua4F8T0. That’s what I did after reading VS’s book. Since then I’ve watched it with the sound.
Without the sound you miss what VS also doesn’t point out (purposely, perhaps, since it fits her argument better in that book). That is, the advert’s dancing-diva-video-music motif that clearly frames it as fun, tongue in cheek, not serious. Without the soundtrack, you just see the bad offensive behaviour not the dance performance. So (with VS ideas in your head) he looks vacant not the sultry diva. With the music, his mother and older sister are not passive offended bystanders, but a mildly, if naturally weary, amused audience of his creative performance.
The lessons I learned are not to cut corners in our research of original evidence or publications, to not cut corners in our critical thinking, and most importantly to watch for and value the artistic tone and framework that may not be explicit but says “this is art or humour not to be taken so seriously”. On the other hand, art and humour may still be smuggling cultural values through (for good or bad) that are worth looking at critically.
You make so many interesting points here, and I like the way you connect and also distinguish between public and private apologies. But I think expecting an actual apology from Trump is a pie-in-the-sky notion. The two key things he learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn, were: never admit you are wrong, and never apologize.* And you will notice that you have never heard him doing either of these two things.
The only tweet he is known to have admitted to regretting was his gratuitously vicious one about Kim Novak, during the 2014 Oscars. “Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!” he wrote, and when she read it backstage, it was one of the most mortifying moments of her life. She was 81 years old and had been very reluctant to attend, but friends had encouraged her; after this, she didn’t leave her house for months.
I’ve given some thought to what it is about this specific transgression that would prick his conscience so, when he has said and done far worse things with no remorse, and I can’t come up with a reason that explains it. I do remember thinking, though, when he announced his intention to run a year later, that the Kim Novak tweet alone would disgust enough people to make it impossible for him to secure the nomination. Hah. As Bob Dylan has written, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
*For anyone interested in finding out how Trump became what he is, I can’t recommend the film The Apprentice (2024) highly enough.
I don’t expect. I just point out what would be normal and ethical and that his behaviour is not.
Very often I am saying what should happen with little expectation of it happening. This is not idealism but maintaining an expectation in order to keep it clear that some person or, usually, movement is falling beneath it. It helps stop normalising things and helps people object ethically and for good reason.
Sorry,* I didn’t mean to suggest that you are foolishly unrealistic although that sort of is what I did, isn’t it? 🤔 It’s really very valuable to continue to point out that these things are abnormal, even if they are common.
*and not perfunctorily
Ha! People often think I am unduly optimistic, but I’m really not.
You’re fundamentally pessimistic in that you see conflict and disagreement as the natural state of humanity; but you personally convey a highly positive attitude, and these two features do not commonly go together nowadays. It’s not very 21st century. This confuses some people but for others it’s an important part of your appeal.
Did you psychokitty approve?
She loved it. I sent you a picture of her listening to it. She appears thoughtful and reflective.
An important and timely read. Thank you for sharing.
Shut the pride mind up…. And find out if you’re sorry….
If you are… say it sincerely without histrionics.