When asked to choose between two evils, whether you yourself choose the evil on the Right, the evil on the Left, or neither evil, one ought to respect and appreciate those whose prudential calculations lead them to choose differently from you.
But we can chastise those who, when presented with evils, refuse to call the evils evil — or, worse yet, say they are good.
President Trump and Joe Biden are both deeply flawed. I have dear friends and family who are voting for Biden, and I have others who are voting for Trump. And I have still others who, like me, are not voting for either. (As for my vote, I associate myself entirely with this excellent piece by my friend and colleague Ramesh Ponnuru.)
I respect all of these positions. I believe good people, using their reason and conscience, can arrive at different conclusions on the questions of who will be the lesser of these evils and how one ought to vote accordingly.
Here’s what is not acceptable: those who, having settled on one candidate or another, begin declaring that their preferred candidate has no flaws, that his flaws don’t matter at all, or even that his flaws are really virtues. Maybe your preferred candidate’s flaws are outweighed by his virtues or by the other guy’s flaws, but that doesn’t make the flaws not flaws.
Here, we find offenses (brace for it) on both sides.
Trump isn’t merely crude or impolite. He’s foul, narcissistic, hateful, disrespectful, clownish, and less concerned with the truth than even most politicians. Even if you agree with his nominations and his policies, these flaws matter. They interfere with his ability to serve the public. His personality flaws also reflect poorly on everything he touches, harming the reputation of the country, the Republican Party, conservatism, and the pro-life cause.
Also, Trump has flouted ethical norms, continuing to enrich himself and his family from businesses overseas and domestic in a way that compromises himself and the country while introducing conflicts of interest. Normalizing this behavior is corrosive to good government and public trust.
Trump’s lack of attention span and his obsession with his self-image have probably harmed our nation’s coronavirus response, resulting in more deaths, more illnesses, and longer, more drastic closures and lockdowns.
His personal life, including repeated extramarital affairs, some of which he has bragged about, and one apparently that resulted in hush money paid to a porn star, is depraved. Conservatives were correct in the 1990s when we said the depravity of our leaders harms the country.
Maybe you think I am overstating the effects of Trump’s flaws. More likely, if you are voting for Trump, you think all these flaws are outweighed by the dangers of a Biden presidency plus the good judges and the pro-life policies that Trump has and is expected to continue to deliver — or at least his ability to block bad policies of a Democratic Congress and keep Kamala Harris away from the White House.
That’s not my calculation, but it’s one I respect, one I can fully understand, and one many of my friends and family are making.
But I can’t respect those who deny that Trump is deeply flawed or who try to pretend the flaws aren’t there. Probably more than any national politician in our lifetime, Trump lacks virtue and displays vice. He is what we raise our children not to be.
And especially if you publicly support him for president, it’s crucial to acknowledge his vices and misdeeds. Otherwise, you are explicitly or implicitly declaring evil things to be good.
Even worse, some who (like me) applaud Trump’s appointments, tax cuts, pro-life policies, and defense of religious liberty go all in and embrace the man himself. They claim because Trump has done some good deeds, he is a great man. His childish behavior is celebrated as owning the libs. His crass and false rhetoric is cheered as real talk from a guy who “tells it like it is.”
Thus, those who won’t call Trump’s vices as vices cause his vices to spread. What is celebrated as virtue will be emulated in the culture. Pretending that Trump’s behavior is fine is harming your fellow citizens by holding up vice as a virtue.
On Biden’s side, there’s a similar offense, but it takes a different shape. The magnitude and nature of Biden’s personal flaws are more typical for a politician, and so, if you agree with his policies, you are not being asked to swallow a pile of extraordinary personal flaws.
But still, he has serious flaws, and they should not be wiped away. But that wiping happens.
The first form is specific to conservatives, especially pro-life conservative Christians such as myself. Some have their reasons to support Biden — typically, Biden seems to be a decent man, and Trump does not. One can point to the cruelty in Trump’s rhetoric and his immigration policies, say this is un-Christian, and that Biden ought to be president because he’ll govern in a more humane way. In general, I respect this reasoning.
But for my fellow Catholics, it’s derelict to ignore that Biden is also an extremist on abortion. Biden says he wants to codify Roe v. Wade and repeal the Hyde Amendment. That means Biden believes abortion is a fundamental right and should be legally protected up until the moment before birth and that the government should subsidize the abortionists.
This is an extreme position and an evil position.
If you are a Catholic, your church’s teachings prohibit you from voting for Biden, as Ponnuru and Robert P. George lay out here. If you are a Catholic, it is not OK to excuse Biden’s extremism on abortion because you like his character, his immigration stance, and his healthcare proposals.
But most Biden supporters are not pro-life Catholics, and so, the main problem when it comes to Biden supporters is simple: They see that Trump is worse than Biden, and so, they refuse to acknowledge Biden’s flaws. Worse, many of the people making this judgment are reporters and editors who, in turn, conclude that they should not report on Biden’s corruption or misdeeds.
Biden is a known plagiarizer, a serial fibber, a pioneer in nasty and boorish debating, and a nasty knife fighter who often sets aside comity to score a political point. But he’s in the middle 50% of politicians on all those scores.
Biden is above average on corruption, I believe, but again, it’s all typical Washington stuff — some revolving-door lobbying here, some family enrichment there. And importantly, Trump (who has kept his family hotel business operating worldwide while president) is perhaps the last politician who has the credibility to criticize Biden here.
But none of this excuses the behavior of major outlets in their coverage of Biden — or non-coverage. The decision was made that because Trump is more corrupt than Biden, it would be misleading, a “distraction,” to cover Biden’s corruption, and sometimes, they even refused to acknowledge his son’s corruption.
There are plenty of old Biden corruption stories involving Delaware banks or Burmese oil fields that the press has shown no interest in. And then, there are the newer Hunter Biden stories.
Biden used his father’s name to make tons of money, promising to enrich companies in Ukraine and China (companies tied to the Kremlin and the Communist Party of China) through his connections to power. Joe Biden is fine with this. “My son did nothing wrong,” Biden has said when asked.
CNN took exactly Biden’s line that Hunter Biden’s foreign influence peddling was fine and flatly expressed it as a fact. “President Trump has falsely accused your son of doing something wrong while serving on a company board in Ukraine,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said to Joe Biden in an October 2015 Democratic debate. CNN’s chyrons that week regularly stated as a fact that the younger Biden’s job with Burisma was totally fine.
And this week, NPR announced that it wasn’t covering the emails suggesting that he did, in fact, introduce a Burisma executive to his father. Why not? They found the emails to be “just pure distractions.” This defense ran the same day NPR’s politics section carried a story about the new Borat movie.
“Distractions” here doesn’t mean “false.” It means “not what we think matters.” And if you talk about the story enough, and point out that Hunter Biden’s foreign employment was corrupt and Joe Biden said it was fine, the inevitable response is: Isn’t the Trump family’s business more corrupt?
Yes. Fine. Weigh the family corruption against one another if you like. Conclude that Trump’s is worse, if you like. But to declare that it’s no story at all that Biden is OK with his son peddling influence to Chinese state-owned energy companies and Ukrainian Kremlin-connected energy companies? That’s an abrogation of journalistic duty.
The media (plus Twitter) effectively made a decision to excuse or cover up the Biden family’s evil because they thought it was the lesser of two evils.
There’s plenty to be said on which is the greater evil for this country. If you’re on the Left, it’s not a hard call. If you’re on the Right or the center, I think it is a hard call. I can respect people who come down on either side or neither. But please, when choosing to accept one evil, please remember it is evil.
