The unacceptable moral cost of political victory

What does Trump's Memorial Day post say about America?

Ah, the gauzy days before everything broke.

President Trump once promised conservatives—and Christians—just about everything we’ve dreamed of. In 2017, his cabinet picks and bold, aggressive moves to reverse practically everything we lamented in the eight years prior to 2017 seemed reasons to be happy. Then the lamentations started and never ended.

In 2019, Trump said “The press is doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

In his first two years, Trump did practically nothing he promised. Instead, he spent his time watching news (“executive time”), defending himself from attacks and slights, and playing musical chairs with the White House staff. The paranoia has only gotten worse, driven by an insatiable desire for those who hate Trump to see him behind bars, at any cost.

This Memorial Day, Trump posted on Truth Social:

Since Trump, two months before his election loss in 2020, was reported to have called the dead WWI soldiers at Belleau Wood (where 1,800 U.S. Marines perished) “suckers” and “losers” (a disputed claim, but read the above post and tell me you don’t believe it), the lack of mention of our war dead is, sadly, expected in a Memorial Day message.

Trump remains ahead in most battleground state polls. This is because President Joe Biden is the first single-term lame duck president in history. If Biden wins, it will be solely because of the fact he is not Donald Trump. I’d also say that it’s because he’s breathing and walking upright, but I don’t believe that’s even relevant this election cycle. Donald Trump will either win, or he will beat himself. There will be no victory for Biden, only joy in the fact it was once again denied to Trump.

One point that gets overlooked is the immorality of our political choices. Winning by lying, threats, manipulation, improper influence of the media, organized violence, and straight out cheating is immoral.

It’s important to be morally right

Forget about First Amendment rights, or “fake news.” Is it right for a candidate president to do this? Does it comport with American, or Judeo-Christian, values? Is America a country where people are declared enemies by our head of government because of their politics, or their reporting of news or opinion?

We need to know that presidents are people, including Biden and Trump. We should not deify or demonize presidents or paint them one-dimensionally. Trump has not been the hardest president on the media; in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that his attacks have actually helped the very companies at which he aims his blasts.

Yet it’s unsettling to my conscience to hear Trump say these things. I cannot take the “but it works” argument and make it fit into a neat moral box. Just because something appears to be mutually beneficial, or contains some element of truth, doesn’t make it morally right. I think it’s important to be morally right.

I also don’t buy the “but Biden” arguments. Biden lies—the typical political lies, misremembered or made-up stories, misplaced facts, and the like. Biden also speaks word salad, and causes people to question his mentation. But I don’t hear Biden pledging to purge America of his personal enemies, or bar certain people from serving in government. It’s one thing to be wrong—and Biden frequently is—it’s quote another to be mendacious, which I believe Trump is the majority of the time.

The ends do not justify the means

Trump has been painted as a pragmatist. Ben Shapiro, writing for National Review way back in 2016, quoted former President Obama.

The most accurate appraisal of Trump actually came courtesy of President Barack Obama this week: “I also think that he is coming to this office with fewer set hard-and-fast policy prescriptions than a lot of other presidents might be arriving with. I don’t think he is ideological. I think ultimately, he’s pragmatic in that way. And that can serve him well.”

Pragmatism is how Obama worked. It’s also how Trump works. We decried Obama’s pragmatism because we didn’t like his ends, or the means by which he sought to attain them. When we elected Trump, it appeared we simply got a different Obama, with different ends and different means, but the same “ends justifies the means” attitude. The problems arose when Trump got his facts wrong, used his own facts, or just made stuff up to benefit himself. This happened far more often than even Obama foresaw.

Because you may have personally benefitted from Trump’s transactional wandering is not reason to call for another round. The fact that Biden’s presidency may have caused you to prosper less (and for many, that’s true) is not reason to run to Trump. Many of the economic drivers leading to our higher prices and huge barriers to wealth were already carved in stone by the time Biden came into office. Biden’s biggest mistakes might have been not reversing enough of Trump’s damaging tariffs (and adding to them), and flailing industrial policy.

But again, being wrong is not the same as being mendacious, or self-dealing. If we had elected Hunter Biden, the arguments I hear of moral equivalency might have more weight. Joe Biden has benefitted—hugely—from his political status. But he hasn’t used the presidency to squeeze millions from the government into his own businesses.

Morality is central to Christianity. It’s not even necessary that our “rulers” are Christian (in fact, making government Christian is a recipe for failure of the church). It is only necessary that our government be moral.

Clearly, the Bible teaches that in the equation of ends and means, means has a much greater weight than ends. Jesus said “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26, Mark 8:38, Luke 9:25). To the Christian, means is really everything. God determines the ends.

Political victory is not worth the price of moral decay

We know that a morally upright president can’t bring moral revival to America. This has been proven over and over. Jimmy Carter was an openly evangelical “born-again” Southern Baptist. James Garfield was a Disciples of Christ preacher and a lifelong devout Christian. He accomplished much to root out corruption in the civil service, yet he advocated revoking the citizenship rights of former Confederates.

George W. Bush couldn’t manage to get the scourge of abortion rolled back, and his Supreme Court picks have upheld Obamacare and made gay marriage the law of the land. These run counter to Christian orthodoxies. Trump’s Supreme Court picks managed to get Roe v. Wade overturned, but that hasn’t ended abortion. In fact, it’s only intensified the battle, and exposed so many Republicans as fake pro-lifers who only used the issue for their own political gain.

Even if Congress, under a new Trump administration, repeals the Johnson Amendment, limits the influence of lobbyists, and puts federal spending under sensible controls and limits, we will still pay the price of having a president who is willing to demonize entire segments of the population to achieve those goals. But nobody thinks Trump will lift a finger to slow federal spending. He will spend like a single sailor on a payday liberty in a seedy port.

We will have a president who addresses federal judges as “so-called judges.” We will have a president who, back in 2016, called reporter David Fahrenthold “a nasty guy” because he didn’t like what the man wrote. Fahrenthold was the Washington Post reporter whose nine-month investigation turned up Trump’s parsimonious and disingenuous giving history.

If a morally upright president can’t spread revival to America, does it follow that a morally repugnant president can’t spread decay? Unfortunately not. And we’ve seen what that decay has done. It may be “non-traditional” for a president to shirk throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, or to avoid the correspondent’s “nerd prom” dinner, but it’s not for a president—a candidate—to spend Memorial Day writing about his “Rape charge”—which he once mentioned, avoiding STDs is his own “personal Vietnam.”

The “natural man” tends toward sin. Coarse talk; winning at all costs attitudes; lies and fabrications; and the demonization of large groups of Americans absolutely has spread decay in civil discourse, media, and politics.

This is what the polls are showing. Voters no longer care about the moral thing. They only care about the other side losing. The problem with this is it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Praying for unity by acting in division will not bring unity.

Pay little attention to the hand-waving where people say the government doesn’t want you to know the truth about, say, COVID origins, or the war in Ukraine, or whatever conspiracy you’ve heard. The government is a big, bloated organization filled with people, some of whom are devoted to their jobs; some of whom think they are Inspector Javert—hard-nosed rule-followers; some of whom are activists; and some of whom are outright criminals. Most other aspects of our society have similar striations, including our churches. When morality recedes like the tide, all these institutions fall with it.

The truth about the stuff people are pointing at is a distraction from the real threat. The moral dissolution of our nation will lead to our decline. It will lead to our political undoing, and the rending of our social fabric. The signs of it could not be more clear. If you want to see the equivalent of a distress flag reading “AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN” read Trump’s post again. We have been warned.

Trump’s Memorial Day post shows more than ever that every drop of American blood spilled to safeguard the freedom of this Republic will be vilified and held in contempt by a man who is currently winning in the polls. What does that say about America?

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