No doubt about it, one of the “norms” that President-Elect Donald Trump is shredding, stomping on and setting on fire is the tradition of Presidents not using their office, visibility, popularity and influence to sell products, with their names as brands. I’m not sure doing this had even occurred to previous White House residents; it certainly never occurred to the Founders…or me, to be honest.

Naturally, because it’s Trump, the usual Axis snipers are horrified. A particularly stinky response issued from New York Times Trump-hating columnist Frank Bruni‘s poison keyboard, titled “Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks.” [Gift link! Ho Ho Ho!]This is what the Axis propaganda machine is left with: playground-level insults for the elected President before he can even take the oath. Honeymoon? Respect? Good faith? Patriotism? Unity? Bi-Partisanship? Nah! What are they?

The matter of Trump’s perfume is more “Ick!” than ethics. Such products as Fight Fight Fight, Bruni writes, “pay tribute to a plutocrat with an insatiable desire to monetize everything about his life in any way possible. To turn political supporters into paying customers and political support into a personal profit center. Not even the honor of the presidency and the dignity once expected of presidents can prevent Trump from presiding over what my Times colleague Katie Rogers aptly called “the churn of a conveyor belt spitting out one Trump product after another.” He adds, “I’d swap ‘spitting’ for ‘belching.’ And I’d add that the whole thing, well, reeks.”

Reeks of what, though? I’m a traditionalist and an admirer of the classic American Presidency, and I find this latest slide down the dignity and decorum scale viscerally upsetting from the “unwritten rules” perspective. On the other hand, pretending that the office of the Presidency is degraded by Trump promoting a perfume that serves the dual purpose of letting his fervent supporters to celebrate his comeback victory while sticking a thumb in the eyes of the Trump Deranged requires a very selective memory. I have to accept it: this is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Presidency any more. Jack Kennedy allowed himself to be mobbed by admirers on the beach wearing nothing but a bathing suit. Lyndon Johnson lifted hsi shirt to show the sagging Presidential belly and it’s new, ugly scar. Richard Nixon…well, I shouldn’t have to go into what he did to the “honor” of the Presidency.

But it was Gerald Ford who really shattered the illusion of President’s not being in it for the money. In office for fewer than three years, he signed with the William Morris Agency and sold his boring speeches and lack-luster appearances to the highest bidder while his more charismatic wife Betty did the same. Soon the former middle class Congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan was a multi-millionaire: he died with an estate worth about 11 million dollars. The Clinton took the greening of the Presidency to new heights (or depths): Hillary hawked a couple of book while Bill was in office, neither of which would have found publishers if she hadn’t been First Lady, while Bill made the office look as tawdry and trailer parkish as possible. Once the nation had been treated to tales of hummers in the Oval Office and semen stains on a White House intern’s dress, all of the hard work President Reagan had put in to restore the image of the Presidency was gone with the wind. Then the Clintons cashed in: a Taj Mahal Presidential library, astounding speaking fees, millions in advances for juicy books, and the ultimate influence-peddling scam, the Clinton Foundation. The Obamas followed the same script, monetizing their brands in myriad ways.

The point here is not to evoke two of the hoariest rationalizations in defense of Trump’s perfume. It’s not that “Everybody Does It” (#1) and “There Are Worse Things (#22) excuse a Presidents using his office as a profitable brand; it doesn’t. The point is that the unwritten rule that “Thous Shalt Not Seek To Profit From Being President” hasn’t been observed consistently or coherently, and thus isn’t a rule at all any more. The Presidency is the worse for it. The country is the worse for it. I hold that such conduct is unethical, but so is attacking Trump for what is, in perspective, a relatively minor breach of the long-dead standard by critics who were silent while Trump’s predecessors were cashing in, though in less creative (and amusing) ways.