Inured to what we've permitted, desperate for signs of a way back

There is one, but it keeps getting harder to see

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It’s time to talk about him again.

The immediate occasion necessitating it is this cringe-inducing resurgence of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. The Wall Street Journal story. The former Epstein girlfriend who said the Very Stable Genius and he were “very close and up to no good.” The video of the VSG standing next to Epstein at a Mar-a-Lago party, pointing across the room, making Epstein laugh. Given the loud dance music playing, we can assume they’re not watching middle-aged men discussing investments. The widely circulating photo of the VSG and Melania and Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, with the women in obvious sex-object mode.

MAGA is, of course, in full attack mode. I saw somewhere that some congressman has cancelled his staff’s WSJ subscriptions. Townhall has already gone after the WSJ story and the above-mentioned Epstein girlfriend.

Okay. There will be parsing of all these matters. Lots of gotcha claims, from both sides. Calls to move on. And it will make your head hurt if you preoccupy yourself too much with it.

Something that concerns me more than this inevitable and tiresome skirmish is the willingness of solidly conservative (as in pre-2016 body of principles) outlets to compartmentalize, to keep calling balls and strikes as if Trump moves on the foreign-policy front can be considered without the context of who he is. National Review editor Rich Lowry has gone so far as to say Trump is a Republican moderate, which, if you read the piece in which he says so, means within the framework of Trump’s reshaping of the party. The Commentary podcast last Friday featured a discussion of how the 2003 letter that’s the subject of the WSJ article doesn’t sound like Trump and therefore there’s a lot of mystery surrounding it.

Damn it, no more normalizing this.

Do we need to verify every iota of the latest round of allegations to confirm that Donald Trump has led a very sordid life? Are the Hollywood Access tape, the Stormy Daniels payoff, the Karen McDougal affair, the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, the stories of him walking around in the dressing rooms of the beauty pageants he owned, and his meaningless marriages now just baked in to who he is, like Calvin Coolidge’s love of horseback riding and fishing?

This is not some unseemly obsession with lurid but ultimately irrelevant matters. He has so blatantly made the “rascal” image such a key part of his persona, we must see how it spills over into other areas of his life and work - the latest kind of work being what we’ve (well, not me) hired him to do twice in the last decade.

He’ll throw anybody under the bus. And pick them up off the road and revive the relationship if they later become useful to him again. Recall the VSG’s ire when Netanyahu dared to show disloyalty by congratulating Biden on winning the 2020 election. And how the VSG framed it in transactional terms. I moved the US embassy! I recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory! I pulled the US out of the JCPOA! And this is how he pays me back! But now the talk between the two of them is of exploiting Gaza’s beachfront potential. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he lets Elon Musk back into his good graces.

The US is finally sending some formidable systems to Ukraine, and that’s a wonderful thing. But February wasn’t so long ago, and that’s when the VSG humiliated Zelensky in front of the world in the Oval Office with the no-cards business. So far, Putin is spending the 50-day window the VSG has given him to stop the ickiness by nightly pounding civilian targets in Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones, but should Putin show the slightest interest in easing up, I daresay the VSG would immediately resume lapdog mode.

Tariffs work this way, too. The economics and finance worlds breathe a sigh of relief when he backs off, but nary a word is said about what a terrible idea they are from the get-go, or the damage done to US relations with Canada by calling the northern neighbor “very nasty to deal with,” or alienating South Korea and Japan at a time when the Pacific rim is particularly volatile. It’s all about hanging on with white knuckles through another day.

What about Bill Clinton and the blue dress? Well, let’s get into that. Bill and Hillary were at the VSG-Melania wedding, although, once Hillary was his presidential-race opponent, he chalked that up to mere transactionalism, saying he expected their attendance in return for his donations to their foundation. You’re known by the company you keep.

Someone, somewhere has to insist on a return to integrity in our search for leaders. Integrity and basic coherence. Some sign that a political aspirant worships an actual God, is capable of humility, of generosity for its own sake, of quiet wisdom, of an understanding of history.

It won’t happen if good people take the position that “he’s what we’ve got, so we have to place him on the continuum of what’s normal.”

In large numbers, we need to not do that.