The Trump campaign, through its surrogate Rudolph Giuliani, successfully achieved a new low this weekend.
Not with taxes, mind you, as our website’s founder JD Rucker explained yesterday. The new low was hit by Giuliani’s charge on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday that “everyone” is unfaithful within their marriages, in defense to that charge leveled against Trump himself.
This is far beyond troubling. It acts as a disqualifying statement, both for Giuliani and, by extension, Trump. The reasons why extends beyond the narrow issue of the sanctity and respect for marriage and the people within them. Disrespect for families speaks for itself. The defects go much farther.
Typically, Americans think of themselves as an exceptional people. Alexis de Tocqueville extolled the character of our forebears, and that character has helped support our systems of government, civic, religious and economic life. There is a moral foundation to this nation.
Now we have a prominent presidential candidate surrogate extolling infidelity. Here are the other ways his comment is unacceptable:
1. The presumption of guilt towards the innocent. As I wrote before, disrespect and condescension towards those in intact families, in marriages, speaks for itself. But the presumption that a faithful husband or wife is secretly a sinner, of equal moral standing as the serial philanderer, is an extraordinary insult. It acts as a demand, from the admitted sinner, for moral equivalence with the good, for unconditional forgiveness without the requisite contrition.
The charge, if accepted, brings the good man (and wife) down to the lowest level. It is defining deviancy down to a new low. The fact it comes from a man of great prominence in American civic life, from “America’s mayor” after 9/11, is startling.
2. The insult is intended. Consider the experience of the speaker. Giuliani is a former presidential candidate, mayor, self-styled security expert and, back in the 1980s, a top deputy in the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. Unless Giuliani is losing his faculties, his experience supports — no, it requires — drawing the inference he knows exactly what he is saying and intends its meaning. That is, he intends to insult you.
3. It exalts envy to the level of a sacrament. Giuliani’s “everybody” comment can be viewed in the spirit of a man who envies the sanctity and happiness which he was unable to achieve (at least at certain points in his life). Our society has been pulled sharply leftward, and definitely downward, by manipulators stoking the fires of envy. Rudy Giuliani slandering millions of faithful couples as unfaithful is no different than, say, Tonya Harding having her then-husband take a monkey wrench to the knee of her Olympic figure skating competitor Nancy Kerrigan in 1994.
4. Failures in life are not a credential. This is an attack on a form of personal success, personal discipline, anything which goes into a successful long term relationship. Unhappy relationships deserve our understanding, but they do not deserve, and are not entitled, to be treated as credentials or as bonus points to restore the reputations of the wayward. Moral equivalency is earned, and if serial philanderers feel shame and have an uneasy time explaining away certain events, that is a good thing.
5. A fifth and final point. Responsible governance requires, in the eyes of conservatives, discretion in the use of government power. The Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution commands “the equal protection of our laws.” Taken together, it requires careful application of government power.
Now, consider one of the government’s most fearsome powers is the power to prosecute. Our Supreme Court has upheld the presumption of innocence against the accused. While this legal presumption is not required in courts of public opinion, its application shows the evenhandedness, rational thought and temperament required for public office.
Now view a comment slandering the sanctity of American families? And from a former prosecutor, no less!
One is required now to ask whether top advisors to Donald Trump would responsibly exercise their power should they be involved in or influence his potential Administration. And one must ask what it foretells about Trump himself if he is elected.
This blatant attempt to define deviancy down and attack the American family in defense of Donald Trump warrants the strongest denunciation. These comments alone justify withholding your vote from Trump.
They also require serious questions be raised to those elected officials who have, for whatever reason, announced they are endorsing or voting for Trump.
The virulent attack on the American family was the province of the Hard Left, the viciously anti-family Marxists. In light of this slander and its other hidden messages I have decoded for you, shouldn’t we — must we — reexamine whether our elected leaders truly are “conservative”?
The post Presumed sin: We are all philanderers before Trump appeared first on The New Americana.