Trump’s America is as deadly as Putin’s Russia

Once upon a time, “moral relativism” — the tendency to draw comparisons between the conduct of the United States and its enemies — was the bane of American conservatives.

In his famous 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Reagan said, “I urge you to beware the temptation of ... blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote, “There is no more misleading concept abroad today than this concept of … superpower equivalence.” In 2011, Rep. Paul Ryan, not yet speaker of the House, said, “If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics — I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.”

Throughout the Obama administration, conservatives excoriated the president for supposedly apologizing for past American actions such as the nuclear bombing of Japan — and for not doing enough to champion the doctrine of “American exceptionalism,” which holds that the U.S. is different from, and implicitly better than, ordinary nations.

So it is more than a little ironic that the chief font of moral equivalence today is a Republican president who has the support of many conservatives — including Ryan. President Trump has no problem trashing allies such as Australia and Mexico or bad- mouthing NATO and the European Union. But he will never say a bad word about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

The latest manifestation of Trump’s disturbing bromance with Putin came in his Super Bowl Sunday interview, in which he once again touted the virtues of “getting along with Russia.” Bill O’Reilly challenged him: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.” Trump was nonplussed: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Putin presides over a regime that routinely murders anyone with the temerity to criticize him. Does Trump mean to imply that the FBI also kills anyone who dares to voice dissent? The FBI has certainly harassed and wiretapped anti-war and civil rights demonstrators in decades past, but even then it never actually killed anyone.

If such “hate America” sentiments had been uttered by a Democrat — say, Barack Obama — you can be assured that every conservative talking head and politician in the land would be rushing in front of a Fox News camera in a white rage. But when Trump does it? A few do protest, but not nearly enough. Vice President Pence won’t even say America is morally superior to Russia. By not doing more to distance itself from this morally obtuse president, the Republican Party is becoming, de facto, the party of moral relativism. If only Paul Ryan were alive to see this.