Obscuring issue of Trump’s character

I gather that everyone in Washington is debating Mitt Romney’s — politically debatable — decision to say the obvious about Trump’s character. But as I am wrapping up my vacation, I’ll have to get to all that later. In the meantime, I’d like to respond to a critic of my claim last week that Trump is a man of poor character.

And I must say, given the hostility many of the folks at American Greatness have shown me since its inception (and which I recently returned in kind), it was a refreshing change of pace to read my friend Roger Kimball begin his curious essay with the words, “My friend Jonah Goldberg.”

I say his essay is curious because it spends a good deal of time and space talking around the issue. He offers an interesting lesson in Greek translation, a subject he knows far more about than I do. Though I did already know that the translation of Heraclitus’s “character is destiny” is open to diverse interpretation, I now have more useful detail to flesh out that knowledge, thanks to Roger.

He also does some perfectly defensible parsing of my claim that everyone supports notions of (good) character while disagreeing on what exactly we mean by good character. It’s defensible, but it also strikes me as gratuitous nitpickery and atmospherics unworthy of his talents, given that a man who can parse original Greek surely understood my point at the first reading.

I’ll dispense with similar minor or distracting animadversions and get to the heart of our disagreement. Roger seems determined to minimize, dispute, divert, and debunk the contention that Donald Trump is a person of bad character, while never actually denying it. The goal seems to be less to rebut my argument than to confuse the issue.

And while he certainly offers a more erudite version than the usual fare, his essay mostly boils down to the same conventional tropes of all Trump defenders in such matters. For instance, there’s the de rigueur whataboutism. Roger asks: “What betokens worse character: tweeting rude things or having sex with your intern in the Oval Office? What’s worse, insulting Bob Corker or using the Department of Justice and the IRS to harass and perse- cute your political opponents?” My record on Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s transgressions is as solid as Roger’s, I think. So these whataboutist attempts at conjuring the stink of hypocrisy fall flat with me. I am the consistent one in this disagreement.

There’s also a technique one rarely finds in print, but often in verbal debates: the pretense to ignorance. Often on TV, or in mere conversation, many Trump defenders will respond to a specific criticism by saying, “I never heard Trump say that” or “I have no memory of what you’re talking about.” Roger seems to do the same thing here:

I cannot myself recall any “rants against the First Amendment,” per se. And I’d say that his “praise for dictators” was really praise for their possible good behavior or acquiescence to policies that the president thought were in our national interest.

I suppose it depends what one means by “rant,” but on numerous occasions the president has talked about “opening up” libel laws and revoking FCC licenses of certain news outlets, endorsed physical assaults on protestors, wanted to ban adherents of an entire religion from entering the country, celebrated the physical assault of a reporter, said (while in Canada) that it is “frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write,” and so on. I don’t think his rants about “fake news,” “the enemy of the people,” etc. are necessarily anti–First Amendment. But given the larger context of his views, I think it’s reasonable to see them that way. Regardless, I am at a loss as to how Roger could have missed all that.

I often like to ask my AlwaysTrump friends, “What can the next Democratic president do that you won’t look like a hypocrite for criticizing?” No doubt there are some plausible policy answers to this. After all, Trump hasn’t pushed socialized medicine — at least not as president. But in terms of almost every other metric of the president’s role and responsibilities, Trump’s most unequivocal defenders are leaving themselves stranded on very small parcel of ground to stand upon once the Trump presidency is over. And their new attitude toward the issue of character barely leaves enough ground to stand on one foot.

Jonah Goldberg holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute and is a senior editor of National Review.