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In recent months, there has been much talk in liberal American circles about the dangers of the “normalization” of Donald Trump. Treat him as a mere politician, the argument goes, and the moral, democratic, and legal norms that form the backbone of America will be broken forever. Criticize his opponents, and you are guilty of false balance and giving Trump carte blanche to behave as horribly as he wants. Say there is something good about him and you are complicit in the free world’s descent into fascism.
I’ve never found such arguments terribly convincing. The notion that a man who is adored by so many should be treated as an outcast, and compared to the worst criminals in history by a media that most Americans don’t trust, it’s never struck me as a particularly effective strategy if the goal is to turn people against him. His antihero status it only made it more popular. Now that America has re-elected Trump as its president, those arguments seem even less useful.
A week ago, however, it wasn’t even scary”mutual” nor Trump’s sycophants, but the current president himself, who has done the most to “normalize” the two things for which Trump has been criticized the most. By using his position to grant his son Hunter a blanket pardon, Joe Biden acted as if he were above the law. Claiming in his statement that he “kept his word” about not interfering with the Justice Department when he and his aides repeatedly insisted they would not pardon Hunter, Biden undermined the importance of American presidents being honest with the public.
Many, including some Democrats, were quick and right to call out Biden for setting such a bad precedent.
But the rush to justify the pardon was just as quick. “Maybe what President Biden should have done is not just pardon his son Hunter, but appoint him ambassador to France,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow suggested sarcastically on Monday, referring to Trump’s appointment of her son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner – whom he pardoned 2020 for crimes including tampering with a witness by setting up his brother-in-law with a prostitute, secretly recorded him and sent the video to his sister.
“Maybe then . . . criticism of the decision would be a little more muted,” Maddow continued. “But yeah, tell me more about how outraged we all are that President Biden pardoned his son.” (If she wanted to know, she could look YouGov poll conducted after the pardon, in which 50 percent of respondents said they disapproved — 35 percent strongly — while only 34 percent approved.)
Maddow isn’t the only person whose defense of Biden amounted to little more than “yeah, but Trump is worse.” I’ve seen countless people make and re-post such arguments Blue sky. And of course he is right when he points out that in Kushner, Trump has once again placed someone in a powerful position who is extremely, sickly unfit for the job.
The problem with that you too it’s not just that he’s intellectually lazy or even morally dubious. It’s that Democrats ran their campaign on the importance of stopping a man who thinks he’s above the law. If Hunter were Trump’s son, I doubt he would think twice about pardoning him, but there would be a key difference: Trump may have tried to portray his opponents as “crazy” and “dangerous,” but he never really tried to claim the moral high ground. Those who claim this must necessarily hold themselves to a higher standard.
Some justified forgiveness by the fact that in a corrupt, morally bankrupt society you have to be corrupt and immoral yourself. If you play normal games, you end up being a bigger fool. I couldn’t agree more strongly: it is more important than ever to uphold the moral standards and norms that hold society together when they are under threat.
Furthermore, this approach will never work. Democrats cannot play Trump at his own game because he will always win. Lives and breathes dirty tricks; he built his fortune on them. The way to deal with Trump and whoever succeeds him is not to get down in the mud and roll around all together, but to show that you are playing a completely different game.
As journalists, we are taught to show, not tell. If Democrats want to win in 2028, that’s what they have to do now, too—less moralizing and virtue signaling, more morally upright behavior and virtue. It is time for them to show that they are not only interested in seeking the moral high ground, but that they deserve to stand on it.
