ROGER KIMBALL believes President Trump "is, in the ways that matter for a president, a man of good character." A good introduction to his full argument appeared nineteen months ago in "The Character That Matters," American Greatness, January 4, 2019. The essay is part of Mr. Kimball's ongoing debate with a prominent conservative never-Trumper who takes the opposite view and believes that, as a consequence of Mr. Trump's bad character, his administration must necessarily end badly. Mr. Kimball's essay offers the thrust and parry of debate, not a systematic argument.
The snip that follows reminds us that American presidential elections are, as a practical matter, binary choices: Candidate A versus Candidate B. This means the character of both candidates matters. In 2016, Mr. Kimball writes, the "choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was an existential, a moral choice—a choice, if you like, that turned upon the character of the two candidates."
I submit that anyone possessed of even a smidgen of what Henry James called "the imagination of disaster" will shudder at the prospect of what a Clinton presidency would have entailed. Who knows whom she would have nominated to the Supreme Court and other federal courts, what she would have done about taxes, about energy, about the plague of political correctness on college campuses, about military spending, about religious freedom, about militant Islamism, about American manufacturing, about the size of government and the burdens of the regulatory state. And who knows what she would not have done, such as prime the economy to ensure near record peacetime employment and strong economic growth—which are moral acts in themselves given the millions whose lives have already been changed for the better.
I say "Who knows," but of course we all know. Hillary Clinton was the most corrupt serious candidate for the presidency in history, and her corruption was not merely in her lying to Congress and the FBI, her pay-to-play schemes while secretary of state, and her handling of the Benghazi attack. It was evident, too, in her fealty to the dictates of the administrative state, to the unaccountable elite that 63 million voters elected Donald Trump to combat.
Well said. What Mr. Trump has done while in office (as distinct from what he has said or done before he came to office) is easy to defend. They are the acts of a man of character.
Once again, we can say "who knows" what the other candidate will do. Except that, once again, we do know. While he had his wits about him, Mr. Biden might have been a political moderate. Today his party is the party of the hard left, and he belongs to that party.
His policies are the policies of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez—Marxism in all but name. Goodbye to a strong economy, honest judges, and the rule of law. Mr. Biden also embraces the cultural left that rules academia and the press. So much for religion, the family, patriotism, free speech.
Worse, he struggles to say an unkind word about the acts of arson, looting, and physical assaults committed by the loosely affiliated militant wing of his party. And when, finally, he condemns the violence (though not, by name: Black Lives Matter or Antifa), it is a transparently political act—corrupt and unprincipled—to fool decent, good-hearted traditional Democrats. When these folks see the truth about their party, he knows, they will bolt to the more principled candidate, Mr. Trump.
Character matters. Mr. Trump's character is better than Mr. Biden's.
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