It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s personal morals — meaning his adherence, or lack thereof to normative ethical standards — are out-of-whack. Politics aside, as a father, Trump was absent, cold and totally uninvolved. As a husband, he is unfaithful, uncommitted and distant. As a Christian, he is lapsed, unenthusiastic and woefully unaware of the requirements. And I’m not just speculating here. Trump’s first wife has long accused him of parental absenteeism, and Stormy Daniels admitted to having had an affair with Trump just a few months after Melania had given birth to their son and Trump has proven time and time again that he doesn’t understand Scripture (remember “Two Corinthians?”).
But should we care about Trump’s personal morals — that is, how he lives his life on his own time? Certainly, we should care about his political policies, but let’s put those issues aside for a second. Is it really important that our president be an upstanding person as well as an upstanding leader? Are the two mutually exclusive or not?
Well, the answer is complicated. There is — whether we like it or not — a very strong precedent for caring about moral rectitude in our elected officials that dates back to colonial times. When we sent local leaders to greater assemblies, we looked for and expected someone with virtue, someone who is honest and forthright and sets his interests aside for the good of his collective constituents. We looked for men who were uninvolved in trade, who could put their interests aside and take up a public opposition whether they opined their whole life for one or not. In essence, we wanted upright men because only upright men made good leaders. God forbid we sent a yeoman to the House of Burgesses — or worse: a merchant with his hands and head deep in intercontinental trade.
Despite the precedent for caring about morality, our leaders never turned out squeaky clean — not even during the colonial area when it mattered most. There was constant fighting, accusations and slander. He slept with her; she with him. They dueled outside the assembly; he took him to court for libel. It was factional, ugly and deeply personal.
Quite intuitively, we cannot expect perfect uprightness from our leaders. That’s a given because no one is perfectly upright. We all make mistakes, sometimes very small, sometimes considerably large and consequential. However, when it comes to the president, we ought to look for a man or woman with at least some sort of moral ideal worth aspiring to.
The fact of the matter is that in America, we don’t have a monarchy. Our president is the head of the government and the head of the state. Certainly, despite the many critiques leveled against having a monarchy, there’s a tangible benefit to separating those things. The head of the state — like Queen Elizabeth II in Britain, for example — embodies the essence of a nation. Meanwhile, the head of the government regularly gets their hands dirty. They might be able to get away with more, slip up every so often, even make a mistake. I mean, they are playing a dirty game of politics, so we anticipate some slippage. The American president, however, has to effortlessly intertwine such behaviors; they have to lead the government and lead the nation. Certainly, there’s room for error, but the room our president has is much smaller and constrained than the room you and I have because they’re the president — and we’re not. It’s really as simple as that.
In that case, Trump ought to serve as some sort of moral example, or else the nation might prove to be disillusioned, disjointed and lost. The problem, though, is that he’s a poor moral example. He cheats on his pregnant wife. He batters his enemies with petty, childish insults. He is absolutely not a Christian — no matter what evangelicals want to falsely believe. He sexually assaults and harasses women. His charity funnels money into for-profit ventures. He bamboozled aspiring students with his fraudulent university, and so on and so forth.
Yes, we should care. So stories like Stormy Daniels’ — which refute Trump’s moral character — should not to be shelved in favor of stories about Russia or Trump’s mental fitness. We should demand a degree of uprightness from every one of our leaders.
