A president with a proper conception of the job might very well have leaned on Kyiv to step up its investigations into corruption implicating American political figures such as Joe Biden, and it would have been entirely proper for him to do so. Political corruption is a major federal law-enforcement priority, and when such priorities are entangled with diplomacy, it is appropriate for the president to give those priorities a push in his dealings with other heads of government.
But because Trump cannot distinguish between himself and the office which he holds — or, in many cases, between himself and the country he serves — he approaches these questions in a defective way. He frames the issue as a personal favor, and he gets his personal lawyer involved in it. Rather than being careful to distinguish between his own political interests and the national interest in rooting out corruption, Trump sees them as part of a single unified phenomenon…
Virtue Inc. was a very big business in the 1990s, and the basic conservative case against Clinton and Clintonism was: Character matters. But the role of character is almost always misunderstood. It begins with a preference for having men of integrity serving in positions of power, but it does not end there. Character is functional in a democratic republic — it is an eminently practical concern. One of the problems with having a man such as Donald Trump serving in the presidency is that in cases of moral ambiguity, it is impossible to extend to him the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt at all about what manner of man he is.
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