After a grinding four-month scandal, the political career of Eric Greitens has come to a richly deserved end. On May 29, he announced his decision to step down as Missouri’s governor, effective June 1.
In 2016, many Republican insiders saw in Greitens the perfect candidate: a Rhodes scholar and former Navy SEAL, articulate and well connected, conservative and politically astute. He leaves office an embarrassment to his party and his state, bereft even of the capacity to acknowledge wrongdoing. His quick rise and fall brings to mind a simple principle of politics—that men of low character will eventually betray their principles, defile their offices, and humiliate their supporters.
Greitens’s problems began in January, when a St. Louis television station aired a recorded conversation in which his hairdresser—who evidently did not know she was being recorded—claimed that he had taken a compromising photo of her and threatened to publicize it if she told anyone about their sexual encounters. Greitens admitted to the extramarital relationship, which lasted some months and ended before he was elected governor, but characterized it as a “personal” and “private” matter he and his wife were trying to “work through.”
This wasn’t some regrettable “affair.” There was a sickness about it. It involved bullying and blackmail. To their credit, statehouse lawmakers of both parties mounted an investigation and, at a hearing in May, read aloud transcripts of the woman’s testimony in which she alleged Greitens had bound, blindfolded, and unclothed her before snapping the photo.
As if this weren’t enough, a Saint Louis prosecutor brought an invasion-of-privacy suit against Greitens for the explicit photo, and the state’s Republican attorney general announced that the governor might have committed a felony by using the donor list of his veterans’ charity to solicit political donations. Whatever the merits of these cases, Greitens’s political career was over weeks ago; only his arrogance kept him from resigning.
It’s no easy thing to evict a man from the governor’s mansion if he refuses to resign. And Missouri Republicans did not go easy on their party’s governor. They deserve rich credit for their stance. Many of them will likely pay a price in November for a downfall they helped to bring about, but their consciences are clean.
Their conduct stands in sharp contrast to that of Alabama Republicans who, in 2017, faced with a senatorial nominee shown to have solicited the attentions of girls in their mid-teens when he was in his 30s, couldn’t muster the strength to push him out of the race. Perhaps state politics is less prone to the neurotic miseries of national elections. Or perhaps Missouri Republicans are just healthier than their Alabama cousins. In any case, Missouri’s Republicans deserve praise for doing what politicians at all times and places ought to do: When one of their own behaves in an abominable way, make it impossible for him to remain in public office or to seek it.
The name of Donald Trump lurks beneath this topic. It isn’t necessary to draw specious comparisons between Trump’s personal behavior and that of Greitens. The latter’s guilt is unique and uniquely disgusting. But no serious observer denies that Trump has engaged in behavior that would have destroyed any other Republican candidate or officeholder. How to make sense of the inconsistency?
Charles Kesler, the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, wrestles with this question in an essay headlined “Thinking about Trump” in the spring issue. We have profited from Kesler’s work for many years and, disagreements on Trump notwithstanding, commend his essay to our readers’ consideration. He argues, if we may be permitted to oversimplify, that the American Constitution envisions the likelihood that bad men will often hold the reins of government. It’s for that reason, Kesler says, that our system of government counterposes ambitious officeholders with other ambitious officeholders. The Framers created a system of checks and balances precisely because they anticipated the rise of morally bad leaders in the American republic.
That is a fair point, but Kesler goes seriously wrong when he compares Trump with other “bad” men who accomplished good ends in American political history—the serial adulterers Gouverneur Morris and Martin Luther King Jr., the sometime drunkard Ulysses S. Grant, the onetime injudicious Grover Cleveland. He even mentions King David, guilty of judicial murder and adultery, and the apostle Peter, who at one point denied knowing his savior. The difference between these men and Donald Trump—do we really need to say it?—is that their follies were peripheral to their characters and public deportment. Trump’s are central to his. They did not boast openly of their sins and market themselves through them. He has done precisely that.
Trump wasn’t just an unrepentant adulterer in his earlier days—he boasted of bedding other men’s wives. He didn’t just engage in quiet indiscretions—the overgrown playboy was his public persona. Hoodwinking business adversaries wasn’t just a subtext of his biography—it was his brand. Wild misstatements of fact weren’t occasional lapses—they were, and remain, his signature rhetorical device.
It’s true, as Kesler and others contend, that the Trump administration has generated far sounder policies than conservatives could have hoped for in a Clinton administration. Tax reform, the scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal, the nomination of constitutionalist judges, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital—these would not have been possible under a third Clinton administration.
But at what price have Republicans purchased these victories? Leave aside the administration’s policy-level failures on trade and spending, its praise of international criminals, its hamfisted misadventures on immigration, its idiotic and discrediting palace intrigues. The more enduring question has to do with the standards of character and fitness Republicans have established as a consequence of nominating and electing Donald Trump to the presidency.
Trump was elected fairly, and his presidency is a reality to which public-spirited Americans must daily adjust. But adjusting to Trump doesn’t oblige conservatives to excuse low character and malign behavior in any leader with an “R” after his name. Missouri’s refusal to compromise shows us the way forward—or perhaps we should say the way back.
