Democrats must not abandon the moral high ground

Over recent months, there has been much talk in liberal American circles about the dangers of “normalising” Donald Trump. Treat him like a regular politician, the argument goes, and the moral, democratic and legal norms that form the backbone of America will be shattered for good. Criticise his opponents, and you are guilty of false balance and of giving Trump carte blanche to behave as appallingly as he pleases. Say there’s anything good about him whatsoever and you are complicit in the descent of the free world into fascism.

I haven’t ever found such arguments terribly convincing. The notion that a man who is adored by so many should be treated as a pariah, and compared to history’s most wicked villains by a media that the majority of Americans distrust, has never struck me as a particularly effective strategy if the goal is to turn people against him. His anti-hero status has only ever made him more popular. Now that America has chosen Trump as its president yet again, these arguments seem even less helpful.

A week ago, though, it was neither the dreaded “bothsidesists” nor Trump’s sycophantic cronies, but the sitting president himself who did the most to “normalise” two of the things that Trump has been most heavily censured for. By exploiting his position to give his son Hunter a blanket pardon, Joe Biden behaved as if he were above the law. By claiming in his statement that he’d “kept his word” about not interfering with the justice department when he and his aides had repeatedly insisted he would not pardon Hunter, Biden undermined the importance of American presidents being honest with the public.

Many, including some Democrats, quickly and correctly called Biden out for setting such a bad precedent.

But the rush to justify the pardon was equally swift. “Maybe what President Biden should have done is not just pardon his son Hunter but name him ambassador to France,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow suggested sarcastically on Monday, in reference to Trump’s appointment of his son-in-law’s father Charles Kushner — who he had pardoned in 2020 for crimes including witness tampering by means of setting up his brother-in-law with a prostitute, secretly filming it, and sending the tape to his sister.

“Maybe then . . . the criticism of the decision would be a little more muted,” Maddow continued. “But yes tell me more about how outraged we all are about President Biden’s pardon of his son.” (If she wanted to know, she might look at a YouGov poll carried out after the pardon, in which 50 per cent of respondents said they disapproved of it — 35 per cent strongly — while only 34 per cent approved.)

Maddow is not the only person whose defence of Biden amounted to little more than “yes but Trump is worse”. I have seen countless numbers of people making and reposting such arguments on Bluesky. And of course she is right to point out that in Kushner, Trump has once again appointed someone to a position of power who is utterly, sickeningly unfit for the job. 

The problem with such a tu quoque is not just that it is intellectually lazy or even morally dubious. It is that the Democrats ran their campaign on the basis of how vital it was to stop a man who considers himself above the law. If Hunter were Trump’s son, I strongly suspect he wouldn’t have thought twice about pardoning him, but there would have been a crucial difference: Trump might have tried to portray his opponents as “crazy” and “dangerous”, but he has never really tried to claim the moral high ground. Those who do claim it must necessarily be held to higher standards.

Some have justified the pardon on the basis that in a corrupt, morally bankrupt society, you have to be corrupt and immoral yourself. If you play by the normal games, you end up being the greater fool. I couldn’t disagree more strongly: it is more important than ever to hold on to the moral standards and norms that keep society together when they are under threat.

Furthermore, this approach will never work. The Democrats cannot play Trump at his own game because he will always win at it. He lives and breathes dirty tricks; he built his fortune on the back of them. The way to deal with Trump and whoever succeeds him is not to get down into the muck and roll around all together, it is to demonstrate that you are playing a different game entirely.

As journalists we are taught to show, not tell. If the Democrats want to win in 2028, that is what they must now do, too — less moral grandstanding and virtue-signalling, more morally upstanding behaviour and virtue. It is time for them to demonstrate that they are not merely interested in claiming the moral high ground, but that they deserve to stand on it too.

jemima.kelly@ft.com