The GOP's Character Cancer
From "restoring honor" to celebrating cruelty: How the modern Republican Party abandoned its moral foundations for Trump.
“The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”
-William Bennett, “The Death of Outrage,” 1998
There was a time not that long ago, when American conservatives were obsessed with the public virtues of private character. Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan titled her biography of Ronald Reagan, When Character Was King. “In a president,” Noonan wrote, “character is everything. A president doesn’t just deal with the problems of the day; he sets the tone and spirit of the nation.”
James Q. Wilson, a longtime Harvard professor, wrote The Moral Self in 1993, a key text in the conservative case that character was the cornerstone of public and private life: “Human beings are endowed with a moral sense — an intuitive capacity to judge actions as fair or unfair, right or wrong.”
When I was working in the George W. Bush campaign, his single most powerful message was “Restoring honor and dignity to the White House.” Of all the ads we made, the one with then-Governor Bush delivering that line straight to the camera moved the numbers more than any other.
While there is much on the policy front that Republicans got wrong in the 1980s and 1990s — remember the Laffer Curve that was the cornerstone of Republican tax policy — they got the importance of character right. “The presidency is not merely an office of power; it is an office of example,” George Will wrote in 1998.
Watching Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend launching a war with the Persian Empire and chortling over killing Iranians — “we might do it again for fun” — I’m struck by what the Trump era has done to our national sense of self. A president who treats war like a snuff film he would have enjoyed with Ghislaine Maxwell — “I just wish her well,” Trump said when the pedophile was arrested — is a cancer on the nation’s soul.