Tu quoque is a classical Latin term for “you too.”
It is sometimes considered a logical fallacy: you do not defend your position, but instead point to someone else’s that is worse—in the fashion of a guilty child seeking to avoid parental discipline by claiming his unpunished brother “did it worse.”
But in truth tu quoque is a legitimate argument—if one both defends his position and also points out the hypocrisy of his inconsistent accuser.
Take Trump.
Over the last two weeks, Trump, the messenger, may have tweeted a few silly things (the recycled John J. Pershing pig-fat bullet tweet) and was considered slow in appreciating the political atmospherics of the rioting and violence in Virginia and North Carolina.
Are his supporters therefore supposed to abandon Trump as the hysterical media demands? Hardly. Here are six reasons why not.
1) Presidential Caring
Presidential morality is not quite an Old Testament open and shut case. In politics it is defined by paradox, irony, and unintended consequences.
Jimmy Carter, despite his smugness, was a more classically moral man (marital fidelity, usually speaking the truth, financial incorruptibility) than was Bill Clinton—a rogue, liar, serial adulterer, grifter, and utterly corrupt. (By the same token, Herbert Hoover’s private life was saintly compared to FDR’s).
But one does not have to be a Clinton enabler or apologist to concede that Clinton’s sometimes centrist tenure did more good for the country than did Carter’s legacy of sanctimonious incompetence, naiveté, and self-righteous stupidity. Who then was the more ethical in helping more Americans?
We can accept that pious Mitt Romney was a more moral person than is Donald Trump. But Romney would likely by now have offered calibrated amnesty, stayed in the disastrous Paris climate accords, and not moved so swiftly against unfair trade, even as he spoke compassionately, soberly, and professionally.
Trump’s immigration reforms will eventually benefit the underclasses in a way a President John McCain would never have considered. Trump, for all his character flaws, cared about the lost middle classes in a manner his much more careful and judicious Republican primary rivals did not.
Trump’s third-way paradigm may seem like rank opportunism from a political chameleon, but its practical effects were a moral and ethical concern for those heretofore assumed to be losers of their own making, a struggle working class lacking the panache of the wealthy and romanticism of the distant poor.
2) The Coach is Not the Team
A president, it is true, is the iconic head of a nation. But it is his administration, not the chief executive per se, that changes the country. The nation did not just vote for Barack Obama alone, but—knowingly or not—also for the likes of Eric Holder, Ben Rhodes, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, John Brennan, James Clapper, Sonya Sotomayor, and Susan Rice. Obama’s picks were predictably progressive, Trump’s were unpredictably conservative and far more competent.
The administration and its agenda is not Donald J. Trump’s alone. It includes appointees such as Neil Gorsuch, Nikki Haley, John Kelly, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and dozens of others. While Trump tweets broadsides against his nemeses, the Trump Administration is undoing eight years of progressivism in a way it is hard to imagine other Republican presidents might have attempted.
In the first eight months of the Trump administration, the economy is improving, people are more confident about their economic futures, the country is becoming safer abroad with a renewed sense of deterrence, and the government is not seen as the enemy, but the enabler, of commerce. There is a certain moral quality in all that.
3) Progressives Are Not Democrats
The political opposition to Trump is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman or JFK—or even that of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, or Bill Clinton.
Rather the alternative is now a harder-core, progressive movement led by Keith Ellison, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Tom Perez, and Elizabeth Warren that cannot register even slight discomfort with the extremist rhetoric of kindred leftist Black Lives Matter or Antifa thuggery in the streets. In their view, the explanation for the past eight years of Obama’s economic stagnation, loss of deterrence abroad, and redistribution is that Obama did not go far left enough.
Thus under their progressive leadership, the transformation to European socialism would have been nearly completed. Think of an IRS of Lois Lerners, a Justice Department of Eric Holders and Loretta Lynches, an EPA of Al Gore clones, a Supreme Court of Sonya Sotomayors, and a State Department of John Kerrys—cubed.
To avoid that, millions of Americans are quite willing to “call balls and strikes”—the much caricatured tactic of supporting Trump’s agendas, but calling him out when his impulses, inexperience, and ego result in crudity or inanity. If it comes down to a war between those who smash statues of Columbus and those who object to such mob violence, the iconoclasts in the street and those who support them in the progressive party lose.
4) Bluestockings Cannot Win
The Republican Party was calcified intellectually and ethically. It had lost two consecutive elections to Barack Obama. Despite eventual control of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court (due to grassroots activism and Tea Party exuberance), the government grew ever larger in the last decade, taxes rose, regulations increased, and political correctness engulfed even more of our lives from the universities to the ways we’re permitted to discuss political issues such as illegal immigration in public. Before Obama doubled the national debt, a Republican president had done the same.
