WSJ Develops A Conscience. Sort Of.

I’m not saying the WSJ’s concerns about “moral relativism” in this age of Trump 2.0 is unfounded,

Trump Accelerates Our Decline Into Moral Relativism

As is often true, he wasn’t the first but is the worst to use others’ wrongs as an excuse for his own.

but when I tell you that there is not a single reference to war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, drug control, resource grabbing, or regime change in this article, well, you can rest assured that Gerard Baker and the WSJ aren’t about to do anything so vulgar as lead any sort of Great Moral Awakening. Basically, Baker appears to be exercised about Trump’s grasp of the moral core of American politics, which seems to boil down to the question: Where’s mine?

Still, Baker has a point, even if he resolutely faces away from the big geopolitical moral issues of the age. In a sense, he’s talking about the political dynamics that Robert Barnes was talking about (see our first post this morning). Trump really only has two years before becoming a lame duck—or worse if he manages to lose Congress. So he has to grab for everything he can get in just two years. As in all else, Trump’s instinct is to everything on a scale that’s larger than anything previously imagined. In a weird way, Baker almost appears to fall prey to the moral relativism he claims to decry. His complaint seems to be that Trump the Vulgarian has mastered the Art of the Grift, while ignoring the war on the world:

His corrosive effect on norms of ethics, language and, for that matter, conservatism, has been amplified by the eager acquiescence of the Republican Party in the process.

The party [or movement] that once liked to think of itself as committed to values and principles has become the most cynical exponent of the idea that everything is relative. A cheerleading chorus of so-called conservatives in the media eased the way. Every time they are confronted with evidence of some new infamy by their president, many on the right will choose to avoid the unrewarding path of moral consistency and opt instead for the tactics of least resistance: misdirection, “whataboutism,” or simply reaching for the blinders. All of these relativist tools have been on display in the last week.

Take the pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the Binance cryptocurrency exchange founder, convicted of money-laundering offenses. This after his firm had been involved in a lucrative financial partnership for the president and his family that helped contribute to the $4.5 billion in wealth they have generated this year alone. Morally equivalent precedents: Hunter Biden? The Clinton Foundation? Hardly on the same scale. What we have seen this year is new levels of graft and grift. We seem to be moving rapidly toward a justice system in which the president essentially gets to decide who should be in prison. If you’re a political enemy, we’ll come up with a crime to fit your punishment. If you’re a friend, we will annul your crimes.

Then there is Mr. Trump’s grandiose plan for the East Wing of the White House. There has been a lot of nonsense about this. I don’t doubt that the left’s hysteria is overdone. It seems certain that, legally and constitutionally, the president could, if he wanted, tear down the whole executive mansion and replace it with a giant casino—and there’s certainly plenty of presidential precedent. This much is grounds for legitimate moral equivalence.

But there is the legitimate question of how it’s paid for. Usage has by now dulled us to the question “What would we say if a Democrat did this?” But some of us remember when Bill Clinton had wealthy donors for sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom, and for weeks Republicans and their supporters in the media treated it as if he were selling the sacred space to the highest bidder. Now we have a president who is literally selling the place to the highest bidders, all justified on spurious comparisons with some changes Barack Obama made on a much smaller scale.

Misdirection is a convenient tool of relativism. Look at the latest mind-numbing assault on sanity of the president’s new tariffs on Canada. The obvious legal, political, moral, diplomatic and economic monstrosity of a president unilaterally imposing a tax on imports because he was upset by something that a Canadian provincial government decided to show on television is literally without precedent. Yet a lot of people on the right have spent the last week explaining how Mr. Trump was essentially right to say Ronald Reagan “loved” tariffs more than those wicked Canadians claimed. (He didn’t, but truth is another casualty of moral relativism.)

As in so much else, the great merit of Trump is to expose the monumental corruption of our ruling class to We the People. The question is twofold: What can be done, and who will do it, to set matters on a better path. Not a perfect path, just a better one.