on Donald Trump, that appear at the end of a piece in Foreign Policy titled NeverTrump Doesn’t Owe Anyone an Apology. Boot is one of the original Never Trumpers, largely on foreign policy issues, although he is less upset in that arena of policy with this President than he had expected than he is on other issues. He is not pleased with Trump’s foreign policy, but it is in other areas that he is most upset.
The subtitle of this piece, which went live late afternoon yesterday after we knew some of the contents of the just published book that have dominated MS-NBC political talk shows, is “The president’s policy achievements can never make up for his destructive shamelessness.”
The piece is brief, and full of good content.
But what grabbed my attention were the final two paragraphs, the first of which reads
The standard retort of Trump’s defenders is that his unhinged rhetoric doesn’t matter— pay attention to what he does. But that’s to overestimate the merit of his actions and to underestimate the impact of a president’s words and example, for good or ill. Conservatives claimed that the “character issue” was all-important when they were attacking Bill Clinton as the second coming of Caligula. But now that they are defending a president who lies an average of six times a day, uses the presidency to promote his own real estate holdings, hides his tax returns, attempts to obstruct justice, stands accused by 19 women of sexual harassment, and endorses an alleged child molester for the Senate, they argue that character is irrelevant. They were right the first time.
I acknowledge that I am a bit offended by the typical conservative tack of trying to balance Trump’s predatory behavior by recycling aspects of Clinton’s behavior. They were over the top then and they are wrong now — Clinton is still on his first wife, and regardless of what one may think of his personal charaacter, his public character was irreproachable: he was not using the Presidency to enrich himself the way Trump is doing. I quote this paragraph because Boot is correct, because if one wants to raise ANY questions about Clinton’s character, it is mandatory to not only raise questions about Trump’s, which is far worse, but also to point out how bad it is, both his private and public character.
Which leads to this final paragraph:
Like any other president, Trump will do a few good things that are worth applauding, and I will continue to point those out when appropriate. But more than any previous president — even Warren Harding and Richard Nixon — he is a moral abomination who disgraces his office on a daily basis and embarrasses the country he purports to lead. Sorry, Trumpites, the rule of law, the standards of presidential behavior, and the norms of civilized society are too precious to sacrifice for the sake of a few — very few! — policy achievements. They are worth far more than $1.5 trillion.
Let's not get hung up what we as liberals think of Trump’s “good things” and get to the hart of this paragraph:
he is a moral abomination and the words that immediately follow.
Note how he concludes:
They are worth far more than $1.5 trillion.
Perhaps someone should tell Paul Ryand and Mitch McConnell that attempting to use this President to achieve their policy goals while in private they acknowledge as they in the past had said publicly what everyone with any real sense around DC and many around the country already know:
he is a moral abomination who disgraces his office on a daily basis and embarrasses the country he purports to lead.
And all of us should remember that the rule of law, the standards of presidential behavior, and the norms of civilized society are too precious to sacrifice for the sake of a few — very few! — policy achievements.
No matter how highly they may value the “policy achievements” (which I and many others here think are destructive of what America has been and should be).
There is the infamous statement by a field grade Army officer in Vietnam that we had had to destroy a village in order to "save” it. That is the price of continuing to allow Trump in office in order to achieve policy goals, even if you were to think those goals desirable. Is it worth destroying so much of what has made America great in order to achieve those?