W. washed his hands and turned his back on Libby because he feared that a pardon might make him look complicit in some way. Bush was at no legal risk, to be sure. He just worried about the optics. The psychiatric term for such behavior according to DSM-IV is “chickenshit.”

Donald J. Trump doesn’t care about the optics. He does whatever he thinks best, and he doesn’t care who tells him not to (unless, of course, it is Defense Secretary Mattis telling him about the limitations and risks to military action).

To the Never-Trumpers who think that our president is a lout and a ruffian who cares nothing for decent standards of behavior, I say: What you call “decent standards of behavior” have become so perverse, so cowardly, so hypocritical and so self-serving that only an outsider, a “lout,” a “ruffian” with contempt for your standards will have the courage to do the right thing. Paul Krugman denounced his “deadly narcissism” in the New York Times, by which he means that Trump values his own opinion more than that of Krugman. A better term is “stand-up guy.” We used to have those in America. George W. Bush wasn’t one of them.