I’m old enough to remember the 1990s, when conservative Republicans routinely preached that a president should be a person of high moral virtue. Their mantra was “Character Counts,” and they were often fond of quoting George Washington, who, two centuries earlier, had said that “a good moral character is the first essential in a man.” Their spiritual leader in the ’90s was Bill Bennett, a former Reagan education secretary who wrote a book about the importance of virtue in public life and declared that “moral anchors and moorings have never been more necessary.”
And I’m definitely old enough to remember the autumn of 2023, when Congress passed a resolution about importance of good character – stressing stuff like “trustworthiness,” and “responsibility.” This resolution is passed on an annual basis to celebrate National Character Counts Week, and one of the annual co-sponsors is Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford.
The same James Lankford popped up yesterday on CBS News’ Face the Nation. He was confronted with the fact that Donald Trump, having been found liable for rape last year by a jury of his peers, has now been assessed $83 million in damages by another jury of his peers for repeatedly defaming the woman he’d raped. Lankford was asked: “Does it give you any pause about him returning to office?”
Lankford replied: “It doesn’t.”
Of course not.
We’re well acquainted by now with the Republicult’s rape of moral values, with its precipitous plummet to the sewer, but its weekend response to the defamation verdict – mostly silence or denial – has been noteworthy nonetheless. And just in case you suspect that I’ve taken Lankford’s see-no-evil answer our of context, here’s what he said in totality after being asked if the Carroll case gave him any pause:
“It doesn’t. Obviously, these are legal cases. I don’t want to jump in the middle of a legal case. It’s been interesting the number of legal cases that have come up against President Trump and then have failed and have been dropped or have been kicked out of the courts on it. This one has actually went through. He’s already said he’s going to challenge it.”
Way to blow smoke, dude.
My thoughts: (1) Politicians “jump in the middle” to comment on legal cases all the time; the cult’s pols are drunk on Hunter Biden, (2) No idea what Lankford was talking about when he cited “the number of legal cases” against Trump that have “failed,” but I do recall that Trump pushed 60 cases in court claiming voter fraud in 2020, and all 60 cases failed, (3) Even though Lankford is invested in National Character Counts Week, he somehow forgot to mention that the guy he wants to return for office has certain character flaws, like being indicted for insurrection, document theft, organizing fake electors, and faking business records to hide payments to a porn star with whom he canoodled while wife number three was home with his newborn.
But Lankford was not alone yesterday. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Trump’s newest supplicant, was similarly queried about the rape-and-defamation case: “Does that give you any pause in your support?”
Scott, who just months ago was on the campaign trail lauding the importance of “Judeo Christian values,” refused to engage about the case: “You know, myself and all the voters that support Donald Trump supports a return to normalcy as it relates to what affects their kitchen table…As a matter of fact, what I have seen, however, is that the perception that the legal system is being weaponized against Donald Trump is actually increasing his poll numbers…The Democrats don’t pause when they think about Hunter Biden and the challenges that he brings to his father.”
My thoughts: (1) Scott is basically saying it’s OK to elect a rapist who defames his victim as long as the rapist brings “normalcy” to the “kitchen table,” (2) President Biden, by every economic metric, is already bringing back normalcy to the kitchen table, (3) Trump’s legal woes in the legal system are not increasing his poll numbers; non-MAGA Americans are increasingly opposed to voting for a potential convicted felon, and (4) Hunter Biden is not on the ballot.
What best explains the willingness of a party that once preached morality to tether itself to a lowlife like Trump? David French, a Trump critic and former attorney for a conservative Christian law firm, wrote the other day that “animosity toward Democrats” has become “the primary Republican value, even more than ideology or character,” that “partisan pugilism” trumps everything else.
“One of the sobering realities of life,” he writes, “is that we often don’t understand our true hierarchy of values until they come into conflict. We might say, for example, that we believe that our political leaders should be men or women of high character…But do we believe that at the cost of actually losing a political race? Or is victory the necessity, and character and ideology the luxuries?”
He knows the answer to that. Sadly, so do we.