It’s important to remember that a lot of Donald Trump’s supporters are so stubbornly loyal to him because he has the right enemies.

How, some wonder, can decent people, including Evangelical Christians, continue to support Donald Trump after (for example) the tape of him bragging about his sexual aggression and attempted adultery has come to light? The answer isn’t that they aren’t offended; it’s that it’s hard to get on board with a cultural consensus that doesn’t consider supporting partial birth abortion or blasphemy to be offensive, but gets righteously indignant over some coarse remarks from a candidate they don’t like.  When vapid, overpaid Hollywood stars condemn Trump for being obscene and immoral -- well, let’s just say that Trump may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but we surely won’t be persuaded by that by a chorus of boys who are always crying wolf.

But should conservatives continue to support Trump? I’ve written before about how Trump seems to have basically conservative intuitions, and made the case that, based on his record, we can expect that he will appoint and listen to people more competent than himself if ever he became POTUS.  But there is another angle we have to consider: Does there come a point where a candidate who may be on the right side of a lot of issues -- maybe even the most important issues -- is too morally compromised to prudently support?

Take Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Today, he is only remembered as a villain, a paranoiac whose Inquisitions brought shame on the nation, a lunatic who wasted time persecuting poor, innocent individuals based on an imagined threat.  The truth, of course, is that the Soviet Union, despite what the intellectuals were claiming, was a horrific nightmare empire that did have spies in the United States (as was proven by the Venona Project), and, in point of fact, McCarthy correctly identified a few of them. He was, in other words, broadly right, and his instincts were far more correct than the dangerous “Useful Idiots” who defended the Communist regime.  The very fact that those sorts of people were so opposed to McCarthy was precisely what made him so appealing to some; it is not unimportant that William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law titled their book defending his crusade McCarthy and His Enemies.

But, for all that, McCarthy did go too far; he did penalize and persecute innocent people.  Many, including Buckley himself, would later say that the worst injury McCarthy dealt to America was the fact that his excesses had discredited the legitimate and necessary work of anti-Communism and of routing out Soviet spies.

This is the important question conservatives deliberating about whether to support Trump need to take into account.  The issue is not necessarily whether Trump himself is personally immoral.  Part of the reason why so many governors in the early Church put off baptism until the end of their lives (such as the great Emperor Constantine himself, venerated as a saint in the East) was because of the idea that being a ruler and being holy were almost mutually exclusive. (There are, of course, politicians who managed to be saints, such as Thomas Beckett, Thomas More, and Gabriel García Moreno; but remember that all of them ended up being killed in office as a result.)  And history seems to bear witness that someone can be a personal moral disaster and still be a competent national leader.

But it is legitimate to ask whether a leader’s moral flaws are such that they do impede his ability to govern effectively.  One thinks of a scene in Macbeth: Macduff has come to Malcolm, the legitimate heir to the throne, seeking to install him out a burning desire for revenge (Macbeth having had Macduff’s family killed by this point).  Malcolm decides to test Macduff first: He claims to be a moral wreck himself, ridden by avarice, intemperance, and lust; he claims to be a greedy sexual predator, in other words.  If Macduff were driven merely by vengeance rather than a desire for justice for Scotland, this probably would not deter him; he would have supported Macduff anyways (an “anybody but Macbeth!” policy, if you will).  Instead, this news devastates him, because it means that the only alternative to Macbeth is not “fit to govern.”  Macduff passes the test; he values the welfare of his motherland over his hatred for the tyranny of Macbeth, and only now does Malcolm reveal that he is, in fact, a holy and virtuous man, eminently suited to regain the throne.  The implication is clear: even if Malcolm were the rightful heir, his claim would not be worth defending if he were not morally worthy of it. Perhaps this same rationale is why Blessed Pope Innocent IX seems to have quietly supported the Protestant William of Orange over against the Catholic King James and his dynasty; the Jacobites may have defended the right civilization, but their monarch wasn’t the right man for the job.

Conservatives are the sort of people who should be especially shrewd about this sort of thing; they should be uniquely skeptical of those who seek to obtain power, especially veteran salespeople.  The Southern Agrarians were writers who defended the conservative, aristocratic civilization of the Old South against the liberalizing ravages of Northern capitalism (Southern authors like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy have always been among the most insightful about the country’s spiritual condition), yet it was one of those very Agrarians, Robert Penn Warren, who recognized that a candidate like Huey Long -- who, like them, and like Trump, was standing athwart globalizing influences and the tyranny of crony capitalism -- was really undone by his own personal ambitiousness and moral blind spots, famously depicted in his novel All the King’s Men.

Interestingly, both McCarthy and Long’s primary supporters and advisers were priests: McCarthy was inspired by Father Edmund Walsh of Georgetown, while Long was empowered by radio host Father Charles Coughlin, whose quasi-fascist views were aired in his magazine Social Justice (we should never forget that one of the first movements to describe itself as driven by “social justice” was anti-Semitic and fascistic).  Both were intelligent men who valued Christian virtue, but perhaps made the decision that these politicians’ charisma and drive on behalf of a good cause would outweigh their personal moral shortcomings.  Both priests made a wrong calculation. 

The philosophical tradition of justice always recognized that passion needs to be controlled by reason, both in an individual and in the state; unchecked sexual desire or covetousness for money, power, or even simple attention impair reason’s ability to function properly. Certainly, as conservative as Trump’s general intuitions may be, he often seems a bit fuzzy and inconsistent on how to implement those instincts consistently (as opposed to candidates like “Average” Joe Schriner or the American Solidarity Party, which strive to be rigorously consistent with the traditions of political virtue), and this may be because he has not subjugated his passions. If his civilizational reforms are as important as his supporters think they are, they have to be extremely honest with themselves about his personal ability to deliver on them.

This long view is the beginning of political wisdom.