As someone who has lived his entire life in the Deep South, I find the most perplexing thing about Trump supporters is the casual way they dismiss his rude, bullying behavior. The South, despite its ugly underbelly (I’m thinking of its history of segregation and racism), has always prided itself on decorum, on the appearance of propriety and morality, even if the deeper reality is something different. One may insult or harm to another person in many ways, but to show them disrespect in public, to flout the rules of public decency, was always socially unacceptable. And yet here we are.
The ways that Trump’s behavior has been excused hasn’t only been hypocritical — that seems like such a mild crime these days — it has been a virtual instruction manual on how not to apply ethical principles. Any vestige of the Southern code of conduct, that venerated set of family values the Southerner claims to have learned at his mother’s knee, is undermined by Southern Trump supporters, who will forgive their Chosen One for almost any sin.
Consider the argument Trump gives for pressuring the President of the Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponent. Ordinarily the act of using the resources of a foreign country against the interests of citizens of your own nation is called treason. The response from Trump’s defenders is that Joe Biden’s son may have been doing something wrong, and so Trump was justified in violating ethical principles to find out.
But where in criminal law does it say that a person can commit a crime as long as he can supply a good reason for doing so? A bank robber has a good reason for robbing a bank. He needs the money. A murderer has a good reason for killing someone. He is very, very angry. Excuses can sometimes mitigate the severity of a crime — stealing bread because you are hungry is different from mugging an elderly woman for drug money, for example — but it is not a measure of guilt or innocence. Stealing is stealing, no matter what the reason is. One might get a lighter sentence for a crime with a good excuse, but that does not make the perpetrator innocent.
The idea that the President of the United States can commit treason as long as he has a good reason is absurd. Further, his “good reason” was that he wanted to hurt a political opponent. If he has another plausible reason he has yet to give it. He says he wants to prove the Democrats interfered with the 2016 election, but the Mueller report showed that it was the Russians who did this. That two year investigation never turned up Ukrainian involvement. Mueller was not able to prove Trump cooperated with this election interference, but that does not change the fact that the Russians, not the Ukrainians, were behind the 2016 election meddling.
Since Biden’s primary relevance right now is that he is running against Trump in the next presidential election, there is a huge personal motive here, one so massive that if Trump had any sense of what the term conflict of interest meant, he would turn the matter over to an independent investigator and take his hands off. Instead, he has done exactly the opposite, not only trying to handle the investigation himself but trying to hide what he was doing from other government entities that could have helped him investigate.
Which brings us back to the Trump excusers who plan on letting him off the hook on this, just as they have on everything else. When I ask them why, they say because “we are doing well.” Which I take to mean the economy is doing well, the borders are tightening, and abortions are becoming harder and harder to get.
If you excuse Trump because the economy is good, you are saying that you can be bought. That a little more money in your bank account is all you ask for to write out a pass for treason. There you are.
If you are giving Trump a pass because of immigration or gay rights or abortion, what I want to know is: Do you think the best way to handle our border problems or prevent abortion is to find a leader who has no ethical boundaries? Think about this for a moment. You argue that you will support Trump for moral reasons. Abortion is so wrong that you will sacrifice every other ethical value to see it banned. This not only makes no moral sense, it makes no logical sense. If you cede absolute power to a leader for the purpose of banning abortion, that person can easily turn around and legalize abortion again. A person without moral compass is the absolute worst type to entrust an ethical mandate to.
Does Trump have dictatorial power? Well, has he been held accountable in any way for his behavior? If not, then he has dictatorial power.
Trump’s election, and continued support in many sectors, looks to me like a kind of despair. It suggests that people who say they want a more ethical world do not trust that there are enough moral politicians to deliver one, and so instead they will support someone who will break every rule in the book to achieve a “moral” end.
This is akin to a man who, because he is having ongoing financial problems, signs over all of his money to someone who runs a brothel. Since the brothel is making a lot of money, the man reasons that the pimp will properly manage his money.
Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. (I would put my money on won’t.) But either way, the assumption that an immoral person will do the right thing and return your money in the end is a ridiculous risk to take.
It is good to have a moral code. But if you have one, you must believe in it all the way. You can’t believe that half your moral code should be sacrificed for the other half. That is almost certain to lead to the loss of it all.
While I think what Donald Trump is doing is indefensible, I think even less of people who have such little faith in their ethical system that they will sacrifice most of their values for the survival of a handful of principles they think are more important than the rest. Value systems don’t work like that. They aren’t a collection of baseball cards that can be traded one for another. An ethical system is a web of related principles. Truthfulness relates to respect, which is related to love, which is related to the family, which is related to faith, and so on. You can’t tear out part of the web and expect the rest of it to hold.
It doesn’t. It won’t.
