We are where we are in American politics, in part, because all these big-picture projects succeeded in enriching private interests … but failed to achieve their stated public goals. The “shock therapy” delivered to Russia midwifed Putinism instead of a prosperous American ally. The war in Iraq ushered in a regional conflict that’s still burning to this day. Chimerica worked out better for the Chinese than for many working-class Americans, and far better for the Chinese Politburo than for the cause of liberty. And the self-justifying doctrine of the present elite — that you can serve the common good while in office and do well for yourself afterward — became far more implausible when the elite’s projects kept failing even as the officeholders kept on cashing in…

In this sense the strongest defense of Trump’s possibly impeachable conduct vis-à-vis Hunter Biden and his father isn’t some sort of careful “no quid pro quo!” parsing of the president’s words. It’s the more straightforward argument that, as Dan McCarthy wrote for The National Interest over the weekend, this was what Trump was elected to do — to “use all legal means at his disposal to strike at business-as-usual among the political elite,” even if that requires trampling over norms that would normally prevent a U.S. president from encouraging a foreign investigation into his rival and his rival’s family.

But this defense requires believing that a kind of “the worse, the better” response to elite malfeasance will somehow bring us back to a less corrupt equilibrium. Trump was indeed, as McCarthy wrote, “elected on his own kind of anti-corruption manifesto.” But there is nothing of republican austerity or Catonian civic virtue in how he has actually governed. Instead, the tone was set, well, by his entire pre-presidential career, but let’s say especially by his campaign-season hiring of Manafort, a statement that in place of elite self-enrichment through New World Order synergies, Trump was offering corruption without varnish, self-dealing without ideological self-justification.