For some reason, Trump supporters get angry when critics discuss the president’s character.
Last week’s op-ed from Mitt Romney was interesting not just for what it was, but for what the response to it revealed. Because the defense mounted by Trump World tells us quite a lot about the decadence of late stage Trumpism.
Romney’s central heresy was his observation that “policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.”
To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable.
Not only is this passage not especially controversial—it’s almost a boilerplate restatement of what conservatives have claimed to believe for decades.
Back in the 1990s, under a different president, Bill Bennett argued eloquently that: “It is our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies.” And: “The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”
But that was then.
Like so many other figures on the right, Bennett made his accommodation with Trump, becoming one of the first conservative intellectuals to make the case for overlooking questions of character in choosing a president. “Our country can survive the occasional infelicities and improprieties of Donald Trump,” Bennett wrote. “But it cannot survive losing the Supreme Court to liberals and allowing them to wreck our sacred republic. It would reshape the country for decades.”
That was one of the first attempts to codify the conservative accommodation of Trump’s full-spectrum mendacity. We know the rest.
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Here is where Romney has performed a useful service: He has exposed the extent to which the acceptance of Trump’s character hardened from tactical improvisation into habit—and this habit has now become full-blown intellectual justification.
This requires not just an alternative reality—one that ignores a lifetime of narcissism, deception, and dishonesty—but an inverted moral hierarchy in which Trump’s character isn’t just something to be apologized for, but is transubstantiated into something that is both necessary and beautiful.
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Neither Olsen nor Perdue, however, are Peak Trump Rationalizers. The championship belt for moral puffery is held, of course, by Jerry Falwell Jr. and his fellow evangelicals, who look at Donald Trump and see King David.
But there may be a new contender on the horizon. Roger Kimball has heroically taken up Jonah Goldberg’s challenge to “come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”
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Rising to the challenge, Kimball writes that voters did not vote for Trump because they thought he was “a candidate for sainthood.”
On the contrary, people supported him, first, because of what he promised to do and, second, because of what, over the past two years, he has accomplished. These accomplishments, from rolling back the regulatory state and scores of conservative judicial appointments, from moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem to resuscitating our military, working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure, are not morally neutral data points.
These accomplishments, Kimball says, are “evidences of a political vision and of promises made and kept.”
And it is here that Kimball makes the audacious bid to redefine the meaning of the word “character.” Add up the list of Trump wins, Kimball concludes, “and I think they go a long way towards a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”
Do not overlook Kimball’s accomplishment here: There as a time when character referred to such hoary values as justice, prudence, truth, temperance, and fortitude. But in this telling, character becomes simply a threshold to be clear by tabulating policy outcomes.
In his response, Goldberg notes that Kimball “employs an enormous amount of logic-chopping and squirrel-spotting,” to come up with a “new and wholly instrumental definition of good character”:
He is saying that a man who bedded a porn star while his (third) wife was home with their newborn child now fits the—or at least a—definition of good character because he delivers tax cuts. A man, who by his own admission, “whines until he wins” and boasts of how he screwed over business partners, a man who lies more egregiously and incessantly than Bill Clinton and used his family charity in Clintonian ways, has a good character because he’s “working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure.” Is that really what conservatives should be telling presidents? That so long as you fulfill your promises to the base of the party, not only will we abstain from meaningful criticism, but we will in fact redefine good character to fit the president? I have deep admiration for Roger, but if I knew what the original Greek for “bologna” is, I would use it here.
But this is where I have to differ from Jonah a bit. The Trumpian celebration of strength over goodness and the sneering at traditional values as emblems of weakness is not utterly new. It is, in fact, somewhat surprising that Kimball would quote Newman and Voltaire, but not Nietzsche, since he seems to channeling his transvaluation of values.
Peter Wehner noted the intellectual patrimony of the Trumpian ethos more than two years ago.
To better understand Mr. Trump’s approach to life, ethics, and politics, we should not look to Christ but to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was repulsed by Christianity and Christ. “What is good?” Nietzsche asks in “The Anti-Christ”: “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.”
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This is what Romney exposed. While mouthing pieties about Christian values, late stage Trumpism is edging ever closer to explicitly embracing Nietzsche’s upside down moral universe. And this is as dangerous as it is disappointing.
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"The acceptance of Trump’s character hardened from tactical improvisation into habit—and this habit has now become full-blown intellectual justification."
Terrific piece by @SykesCharlie, with the introduction of the great phrase, "late-stage Trumpism."https://t.co/gNnZ21bDZY— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 7, 2019
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