A Man of Low Character

A Guide to the Trials of Donald Trump

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

I have been planning to write something about Donald Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts in his porn star hush money case in New York—follow that link, by the way, it’s a good explainer on what the counts consist of. But there have been a lot of people delving into the legal and political angles on this, and as with anything involving Trump, it’s easy for us to get pulled into all the usual arguments swirling around him. I wanted to find a way to stand back and look at this from a big-picture perspective.

I think I can boil the lessons of this case down to three basic truths.

1. Trump is a man of exceptionally low character.

2. He engaged in a serious effort to hide this fact from voters.

3. Whenever they are paying attention, voters figure out these first two truths.

Let’s work through these propositions, bringing back in some of the legal and political issues.

An Exceptionally Low Character

First, Trump is a man of exceptionally low character—and “exceptional” here is not just a rhetorical flourish. I mean that there are few people in the world as slimy as this guy. We’ve kind of had this fact beaten into us so many times that we stop reacting to it, and I guess that’s one of the tricks Donald Trump has learned. If you are unremittingly awful all the time, people just get used to it and expect it. They adjust the baseline for your behavior down to such a low level that you get away with a lot more stuff.

So we just get used to calling this Trump’s “porn star hush money case” and then shorten it down to “hush money case.” And we don’t step back to realize that a man who used to be president of the United States, and who has once again won the nomination of this country’s socially conservative party, had sex with a woman famous for appearing in pornographic films, did so while his wife was recovering from giving birth to his son, paid the porn star to maintain her silence, and hid this payment so he could still gain the votes of the religious right. I mean, it boggles the mind, doesn’t it?