This post is partially catch-up: I decided to make this a continuing series so that I can have an accurate record of the posts dealing with the ethical dilemmas and conflicts created by this most unique White House occupant.
Reason #1 I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago: Trump and the reaction to him by the Axis of Unethical Conduct creates so many ethics controversies that it throws the balance on Ethics Alarms out of whack. I resent it. I get sick of focusing on national affairs and politics, which, I swear, are not where my greatest interests lie. But I also am trying to cover the entire ethics landscape in the limited time available to me. Trump and the intense reactions to him make that all but impossible.
Reason #2 is the way Trump Derangement renders so many friends, relatives, colleagues and associates emotionally and intellectually dysfunctional. My brilliant younger sister, for example, has been angry at me as well as the world ever since November 5; I can hear it in her voice. On Facebook, one or more of my friends embarrass themselves every day with rants, reductive outbursts, or inexcusably ignorant declarations, and nobody challenges them because a) it’s futile and b) if you do, one or more friends will decide you’re a fascist. Here’s one that I just saw:
Literally nobody in the Trump administration (that’s “they,” as in “the other”) has talked about or advocated “getting rid of Social Security,” but the posting of such crap proves that a once relatively rational friend has been listening to Al Green and Jasmine Crockett and taking them seriously. I know this will go on for four long years. I don’t know how I’m going to stand it.
Reason #3 why having Trump as President drives me crazy—and I knew this was going to happen—is that the broadcast news media, including Fox, is unable to talk about anything else. To the Axis media, everything is a crisis or an outrage: we went from the networks attacking Trump for not tolerating Zelenskyy’s arrogance directly into freaking out over the President’s State of the Union address. (Fox News, of course, sees its job as defending whatever Trump does or says.) This morning I watched Symone Sanders and a panel waive their arms and shout red-faced into the camera about Trump “lying” when he said that Elon Musk and Marco Rubio have a “great relationship.” Who cares what their relationship is, as long as they both do their jobs? “Great” in that context can mean anything, including, “they respect each other and that’s all I ask.” This is an amazingly transparent administration thus far, but there is no reason for the President to get into the high weeds of inter-staff and cross-department spats. George Washington was scrupulously honest, but if he were asked about how Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton got along (they detested each other), he might well have answered, “They get along great,” meaning “they haven’t tried to kill each other so far.”
What I really wanted to write about is Reason #4, which is illustrated by Trump’s recent Truth Social post where he wrote in part,
“Republicans should utilize the footage provided on the total disrespect they showed to all of those that were honored that night, including young ladies who were killed by illegal migrants, people with terminal cancer, etc. They didn’t even have the common courtesy to stand, smile, or applaud.”
Trump doesn’t understand the essence of his own office, and how it needs to be maintained and preserved. This is not surprising, based on how he handles himself and his lack of self-control in his use of inflammatory rhetoric. Surprising or not, it is a serious deficit. The Democrats refusal to acknowledge all of the human props Trump used during his speech was stupid and petty; on the other hand, the device of using such individuals to attract “Awww”s and cheap applause is cynical and nauseating. It was a Reagan trick, and has gotten way, way out of hand. What is genuinely damning, and what Trump should be emphasizing, is the contempt and disrespect for the office of the President, the Presidency itself, displayed by Democrats that night. Democrats began the “otherizing” of the Presidency in 2017, and continued the dangerous strategy right to the end of his term. Trump doesn’t recognize this as the dangerous fault line it inflicts on our republic because he engaged in the same practice toward Joe Biden.
The more the Presidency is reduced to the human failings and flaws of its occupants, the less effective the institution is, and the less effective the institution is, the weaker and more at risk the nation is. Who knows how much damage the tag team of this President and his ruthless, desperate political enemies will inflict on the Presidency in four years, even if Trump’s administration is, on balance, successful? There is a real danger of winning the battle and losing the war.
Ethics Alarms 
I think we lost the war back during the Obama administration — not because we elected a black man, but because we elected that black man. Obama used race as a lever to pry the country apart, and that schism just gets wider with every new Democrat freakout, Trump trolling post, and media mau-mauing.
For your part, no ethicist can ignore what’s going on in the political arena, it’s simply too significant. There is a real risk of open partisan conflict, although I confess I overestimated that risk before and it certainly doesn’t look imminent even now. But there is always a “last straw,” and it may come out of the blue. With Trump in the White House, every day is potentially explosive from a political standpoint.
Right now, the Democrats are in disarray and their constituents are despondent. But that won’t remain true forever.
For the Trump Deranged, every day is the last straw, Glenn. It’s Groundhog Day for them, infinity.
Seems that way.
The best political tactic for the President is to keep the Democrats deranged until he is out of office. At this blog our host called the President an ethics dunce because of a couple of things he said in his SOTU address. I watched the SOTU live, plus the complete meltdown of the Democrats this week, and I can only conclude that the SOTU was politically a smashing success; I almost felt sorry for those poor Democrats. Donald Trump announced his traps during the SOTU, the Democrats fell for all the traps, and the President had the Democrats exactly where he want to have them. The poll numbers show that this tactic worked. So I would like to ask our host Jack whether he still stands with judgement about Donald Trump being an ethics dunce. My opinion is that Donald Trump showed mastery with the SOTU, and competence is an ethical value.
Old Bill mentioned the movie Ground Hog Day. I like that movie, and weatherman Phil Connors is only able to break out of the time loop after demonstration of significant personal growth. The Democrats will only get out of this funk after they make significant growth in multiple areas such as values, ethics, norms, policies; else it will be Groundhog Day for them for many election cycles. This is not for the GOP or the President to solve.
As for the President, he knows how to play the asshole. I do not think there is anything unethical with being an asshole. Assholes may be needed to get important things done, and to correct misbehaving people and institutions. He is effective as a troll, not always but definitely when it matters. And trolling is not unethical either; and hereby I raise my glass to the greatest troll of all times, the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes!
I am actually glad that we have a President who is willing to fight, as this is the only way to earn back respect for the President and his party. The Caspar Milquetoast strategy of the GOP with leaders as Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Bill Frist, and with Mitt Romney as Presidential nominee did not work as they were enable to enact their agenda, and they were still framed as racist, homophobic, and many other terms of abuse.
About lost respect for institutions and norms, this can only be fixed when the people see that the government start functioning again for the benefit of the people, in order to secure our liberty. Right now I feel that the people have been abused as workhorses by the government, in order to secure the power and finances of entrenched political interests. I worry about that much more than about a President being impolite in stating the obvious in the SOTU about the Biden presidency.
While I tend to agree with much of your comment just because something benefits your cause does not necessarily mean that the act is ethical. The Russia hoax was effective in hamstringing Trumps first term that was far from ethical.
First, there is an ethical difference between perpetrating a hoax and being rude and boorish. A hoax needs to be rejected on Kantian grounds almost without any exceptions, and in most cases also on utilitarian grounds. Bad manners and attitude may be acceptable on utilitarian grounds. Even Jesus breached etiquette and was rude, e.g. when cleansing the Temple, or calling out the Pharisees for their slights when being invited by them for dinner.
Second, when invoking utilitarian grounds to defend a certain practice we need to look at who benefits from that practice. Is it a select group that benefits at the expense of the general public? Or is it the general public that tends to benefit more?
So when we compare Trump’s behavior with the Democrats’ behavior I believe it is obvious who is more ethical.
So my observation is that people who trend politically right need to stop clutching pearls any time Trump says something that is not nice.
A familiar refrain in law firms applied to difficult clients: “He may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”
It is important to remember that the President’s decorum and civility are more important than that of anyone else. He’s the role model, the fish head from which all rots down. That was my point in 2015 with the much linked “A Nation of Assholes” post. Democrats are now saying”shit” and “fuck” all the time: Trump’s the reason for that. I did an asshole inventory of the Presidency: almost half of them were assholes, and yes, sometimes it came in handy. But Trump is the first President to be so openly an asshole in public. It hurts him, it hurts the office, and it hurts the country. The Asshole list:
Adams
Jefferson
Jackson
Tyler
Fillmore
A.Johnson
Cleveland
Teddy
Wilson
Coolidge
Hoover
FDR
Truman
Kennedy
LBJ
Nixon
Carter
Clinton
Bush II
Obama
Biden
Trump
Reason #1: Perhaps, you could create a weekly Trump Presidency entry addressing all of the issues that week by bullet points?
Reason #2: I hear you. My sister makes a point in our weekly Zoom call to mention that she has been attending “protests”, yadda, yadda. She admits she is bitter. The news media has done a great job instilling fear in the hearts of people who are convinced he’s going to do things there’s no evidence he’s going to do.
Reason #3: That’s what we get for having a news media that works on ratings. It’s a double-edged sword for sure. Fear and Doom sell so they are definitely going to sell fear and doom about someone they already hate.
I am… tired. I don’t know. In a funk. Because I feel like the American decline is probably unavoidable, and even if the rest of the world didn’t already have similar issues, you’d end up dragging a lot of the world down with you anyway.
The problem is that people are stupid. Define that however you’d like: Despite having more access to information than any generation before us, we are consistently uninformed. Our collective ability to problem solve has degraded. Our education systems are a joke. And that all matters because everyone has a vote.
And it’s not as simple a problem as “the people voting for my opponents are morons” because you just don’t have good candidates, you’ve been picking what you think is the best kernel out of the turd for so long you’ve forgotten what it’s like to actually vote for someone, as opposed to just voting against the other guy. And the reason you don’t have good candidates is because your people vote for the most incredible caricatures on a party level, who have to run like insane people to win their nomination race, and then once nominated have to try to scramble to the center and moderate for the general… Which comes off as inauthentic, at best. Worse though, is that the nomination process often elevates legitimately insane (Marjorie Taylor Greene), unintelligent (Mazie Hirono, Hank Johnson), or dishonest (George Santos) people, and without good candidates on either side, sometimes get through.
I consoled myself for a while, telling myself that the people who were running weren’t as bad as they seemed, I told myself that they had to act like that in order to get elected, and that they’d moderate in office… And for a long time, that was true. All the whining from the fringes about RINOs over the last 20 years basically describes what I’m talking about. But recently, what you see is what you get, and it’s rawdogging the system.
I was really hoping that Trump would govern well. At least as well as he did the first time, maybe with a little bit of an edge for having the experience of his first administration. And the signs were there: His cabinet picks are generally very good, DOGE is a great idea, a lot of his executive orders are spectacular…. But his economic policies are some of the greatest unforced errors in modern American history, and it’s bleeding into foreign relations.
Take Ukraine-Russia. You can have almost whatever opinion you want on the topic, because there’s a lot of room for good discussion, so long as you stop short of calling Russia an ally. Russia is not, and has never been, an American ally. How is this relevant to Trump’s trade policy? Because he is tariffing Canadian potash.
Tariffs are an internal tax, meant to nudge people towards buying domestic product. A protectionist subsidy on markets you want to nurture. Yes, we do something like this with dairy, we feel that having a dairy sector is important for our national security when it comes to food chains. No, we don’t have one on lumber, and in fact, even before this 25% blanket tariff, America had a 14.5% tariff on Canadian lumber, so not only was he wrong, he was actually saying the polar opposite of what was true.
Trump is tariffing Canadian products because…. Reasons? Border Security? Fentanyl? Dairy Quotas? Banking Systems? Trade Deficits? An American Desire for Empire? This is particularly frustrating, because we might even give him what he’s looking for, or could at least compromise, if we actually knew what he wanted, but he negotiates like a chaos gremlin. I suppose while the stated reason changes on an hourly basis, it doesn’t really matter on this specific topic, because America doesn’t have potash production. Potash is an ingredient in agricultural fertilizer, and Canada produces about 35% of global supply. Who supplies the rest? Russia and Belarus account for about another 35% of global production, China is about 10%, Israel is about 4%, the remaining 16% nests under “other”. If America tariffs Canadian potash, what are American farmers going to do? In the short term, they’re going to buy Canadian potash at a premium, until other markets can ramp up production, and then they’ll start buying from those other markets.
Which means that in the short term, America is going to artificially increase the cost of crop inputs, which will effect food prices for the next two years, and in the long term, they’re going to tie an element of the food supply to trade with Russia.
Does anyone want to take a stab at defending this? Trump is completely out of compliance with the USMCA treaty that he himself negotiated and signed, now calling it a bad deal. He’s doing this in order to put pressure on Canada, to try to get…. Something. And he’s doing it in a way that is going to increase American food prices and shift trade relationships from Canada to Russia.
Make it make sense.