Three weeks after I inflicted a giant hematoma on (in?) my leg, I’m still having trouble getting past the two-post-a-day barrier, in great part because I’m hopeless on a laptop, and sitting at my desk in the office is still painful. I’m sorry: I’m missing a lot; the EA runway looks like a Reagan National flight stop due to high winds and thunderstorms.
A needed observation on the Trump Presidency so far: wow. That wow isn’t about what Trump and his team are doing, but the fact that they are doing it. I’ve compared Trump II to Andrew Jackson, but I now believe he is channeling my favorite President of all (again, in terms of Oval Office conduct, not policy), Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy, like Trump, was a Presidential activist and believed in using the power he had to do things, fix things, and project American power abroad. He also believed fervently in American exceptionalism, as all Presidents (and citizens) should. Like TR, Trump is trying to stop international conflicts that don’t directly involve the United States: Roosevelt was the first U.S. President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Trump has already exceeded his accomplishments in that sphere.
You would think he could get some praise from the Axis for this. Nah. The news media is still relentlessly attacking him and everything he does, and there are enough Stage 5 Trump Derangement victims and gullible, manipulated fools among the public to keep Trump’s polling numbers under water.
To his great credit, President Trump doesn’t seem to care. Among the many ways his second term is breaking with conventional wisdom, he has turned his lame duck status into a weapon. Fascinating. There is so much to see and learn from going on. Those who refused to pay attention are missing a great show and a transformational Presidency, as Trump joins the lofty company of Washington, Andy, Honest Abe, Teddy, FDR and the Gipper.
Over to you…
Ethics Alarms 
An aeticle by John Kass.
https://johnkassnews.com/a-broken-father-a-broken-nation/
Question, first of all to our host Jack. President Trump has often been crowned with the ethics dunce cap at Ethics Alarms. However, in this post our host compares positively with Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. I see a bit of tension here, enough to raise questions, and perhaps review the ethical status of Trump as POTUS.
My first question is how important ethics is for President. My personal impression is that ethics is only one of the criteria, ranking lower than values, goals and accomplishments. E.g. Jimmy Carter prided himself and is praised by others for his ethics, but his administration was a failure.
My second observation is that Trump’s success as a President is positively correlated with his abrasive and confrontational style. The President, in his role as Troll-in-Chief, drives the Democrats completely crazy. Nobody out-trolls the President. I look at this, and although there are voices that this may be unethical, I still love it. So are we perhaps looking at Presidential ethics the wrong way? Doesn’t a President have an ethical duty to strive for political success, and are we here at Ethics Alarms too focused on style points of minor importance?
My third question is whether tension may exist between high ethics and success as a President. In order to achieve greatness you have to be bold and audacious, and take risks. That may include the willingness to question common wisdom, defy other people’s opinions, and break rules. This may blow up in a President’s face (such as Senator John McCain keeping Obamacare in place in order to spite Trump), but in the second term it seems to work as intended. Low ethics may sink an administration (e.g. Harding) but so may a too elevated concept of ethics (e.g. Jimmy Carter).
Would it not be better to follow a concept of Realpolitik, which emphasizes practical considerations and national interests over ideological or moral concerns, and evaluate a President’s ethics in the light of his accomplishments?
I much prefer ethical leaders to unethical ones, but leadership ability and ethical orientation are barely correlated. Trump, as far as I can discern, has no ethical core at all. Neither did FDR. Jackson’s ethics were, shall we say, shaky. TR loved war, which is not what I’d call an ethical orientation.
CVB, I believe your proposal that we should “evaluate a President’s ethics in the light of his accomplishments” is in line with how history tends to evaluate leaders based on the SCOPE of their impact (subject to the caveat that the winners write the history, hence Hitler bad). And when that impact is both negative and positive, the positive tends to rise to the top. Unlike JM, I am not a student of the American Presidency generally, but I have read a fair amount about historical leaders related to my academic interests in war and atrocities.
Whatever the “horrors” those with TDS are attributing to Trump, any negative impacts historical judgment might record will likely be pretty trivial compared to the horrific impact of famous leaders throughout history, whose accomplishments not infrequently included pretty high body counts.
In one of my favorite books about war and atrocities generally, White (2012) writes “For every cruel psychopath slaughtering hundreds of thousands without mercy, I found another ruler with a better historical reputation killing just as many. Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler, for example, easily fit the stereotypes of the devil incarnate, but other deadly rulers on my list left a mixed legacy as lawgivers (Justinian, Napoleon), modernizers (Peter the Great, Mao Zedong) and organizers (Qin Shi Huang Di). One of the most frightening things I discovered is that murdering huge numbers of people doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person–at least, in the eyes of history.” (p. 542, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things)