Most liberals know Donald Trump is a selfish person, close to being a narcissist. But, in their anti-Trump zeal, they forget that he is also an amoralist, the twin brother of selfishness. It’s easier to see his selfishness, such as his extreme craving for popular adulation. But his amorality is much more dangerous in a president, though less well known. We know how to deal with selfishness, but not as easily with amorality.

Trump has no moral beliefs. Free from the conventional labels of “moralists” (good guys) or ”immoralists” (bad guys) we apply to politicians, he is a self-promoter without public morality. In this vacuum of morality, he changes his mind about anything any time and for any reason or even no reason. With no chain of reasoning in his intellect, he does not believe in cause and effect, and he casually contradicts his previously stated beliefs.

Today he may say immigrants make America “a hell-hole,” but tomorrow he could just as casually say immigrants “Make America Great.” His amorality makes illogic logic and extraordinary ordinary.

As a publicly amoral person, he hates nothing and loves nothing, except himself. He proposes nothing and opposes nothing, as his own conviction. He adopts policies and drops ideologies in his sleep. His friends and foes come and go just as easily and switch their places just as quickly.

Most amoralists tend to be socially unconscious and lazy as citizens, not fatal to our collective welfare. But, as the amoralist man-child, Trump combines his amoral infancy with world-destroying power, and America finds itself breathlessly hanging onto the imperial decrees from the enfant terrible. Since he is an amoralist, the historic or existential meaning of his decisions does not bother him at all.

We doubt that he even read his own 100 executive orders, any of which he can abandon just as imperially as he signed them. Nobody, including himself, knows what his plans are or how his plans will play out.

With no clear “moral” or “immoral” conceptions of life to guide or hide him, Trump always tells “the truth.” When he speaks, he speaks what’s on his mind (the truths), which doesn’t always accord with the next time he speaks on the same subject (the lies). For him, there are no logical connections between two time periods whose contradictions are responsible for his numerous “lies.”

When his feelings are wounded, he reacts like a scorned child, with an open whimpering or a hidden rage. He says x, y and z are “terrible, terrible, terrible,” but cannot explain why they are so terrible.

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He victimizes many people, with words and acts, but lacking in morality, he feels no remorse or guilt about his deeds and remembers nothing of the events any more than what he ate for lunch. If you are hurt by him, like E. Jean Carroll, it’s like being bitten by a dog: accidental and unconscious. Unsurprisingly, his “relationships” with people, from marriage to staffing, are strictly utilitarian: He hires anybody, even Abominable Snowmen, according to his utilitarian self-calculus as long as it serves his purpose.

The people who surround him are his instruments and functions, like his shoes; you wear them if they fit and discard them if they don’t, without the slightest misgivings.

He never contemplates on the vagaries of fame and popularity in his twilight years, or the reckoning of his days when he draws his last breath. In his freedom from moral sufferance, he is unlike any other human being on Earth. Even heartless corporate CEOs, as amoral as Trump, are expected to return to normal humanity in retirement. After all, they are neighbors and grandparents in their real life.

Even Hitler pondered upon his retirement and the fickleness of fame and popularity. If reflections are an ongoing conversation with oneself, essential to human maturity, there are no signs that Trump ever carries on a conversation with himself.

Wholly unaffected by moral sentiment or individual humanity, Trump can potentially be the most far-reaching change-maker in American history; indeed, he can reform, without pity, all the hypocritical fantasies of liberal Democrats who pursued ”utopian” perfection in everything except reality. But, with his indifference to humanity, Trump can also be the most colorful footnote to history. Upon his death, history will call him either “The Greatest Reformer” or “The Greatest Clown.”

Liberals peg him as a racist, even a capitalist. But, he doesn’t have enough intellectual curiosity or desire to qualify as a racist or capitalist. He prefers “large captions and color charts” in his briefings and “race history” or “capitalist theory” are just too much for him to handle. He can be nasty to Blacks without being racist and greedy without being capitalist.

He throws red-meat racism to his followers and he pockets public funds for his loose change. Neither gives him sleepless nights, and when he proclaims, “I am not a racist,” or “I am rich, I don’t need your money,” he is actually telling the truth.

In his childish guilelessness and childlike innocence, he believes one race is just like another, one culture is just like another, and even one nation is just like another. His love or hate toward anybody is without prejudice.

Biographers try to unlock the Trump puzzle by saying that young Trump modeled himself after Roy Cohn, the most singularly inhuman misanthrope. But Cohn was an immoralist, not an amoralist, intensely consumed by his love unrequited and his hate unresolved.

Trump never grew up enough to humanize his love or hate, and the origin of his stunted moral growth is still a mystery.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.