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So often we talk about legality. That can miss the larger point. A better conversation is about morality. John Adams understood that and said so in a 1798 letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the militia of Massachusetts:
“Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams wrote those words at a time when Americans feared political extremism and factionalism. Sound familiar? The shadow of the French Revolution loomed large. If it could happen there, many wondered, could it happen in the young United States?
Adams was not merely warning. In many ways, he was reassuring. His faith in free government rested on an assumption: that the American people possessed enough honesty, virtue, civic responsibility, and cultural restraint to govern themselves without the need for overwhelming coercive power. In Adams’ view, a sufficiently moral people would make tyranny unnecessary — and therefore unlikely or even impossible.
Was Adams wrong? Have we lost that moral edge? The one so deeply ingrained in the American character that it naturally shaped every branch of government, especially that of the executive?
President Donald Trump — policy aside — is arguably not, on balance, a moral man. The examples are numerous and well known; there is little need to relitigate them here. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
Nor is Trump the first president to flirt with crossing the moral line. But if Adams’ hypothesis is correct, then conduct such as the “slush fund” controversy and the broader culture surrounding political retribution are not isolated events. They are manifestations of a deeper erosion in the moral framework the Constitution quietly depends upon. Not good.
That is why more leaders must be willing to speak up publicly — not only to question actions like the slush fund, but also motives rooted in vengeance, intimidation, and the demand for absolute loyalty. Little good comes when loyalty is valued above honor – what is right. Yet that increasingly appears to be the expectation: support the president completely or risk political destruction – just ask Thomas Massie, Bill Cassidy or John Cornyn. That impulse itself runs contrary to the moral character Adams believed essential to republican government, one he seemed sure was a given.
Perhaps that supply of civic virtue is running low — at least in the case of the current occupant of the Oval Office? Maybe it’s been in short supply for some time? Undoubtedly, it is agnostic to party or other political labels.
In that same letter to the Massachusetts militiamen, Adams wrote:
“But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation toward one another and toward foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and assassination, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.”
The language is deep and more formal than what we use today, but the meaning is remarkably modern: if Americans ever become the kind of people who publicly praise justice, honesty, moderation, and sincerity while privately embracing corruption, selfishness, deceit, and cruelty – perhaps more importantly, even tolerating those things – then America itself will become a miserable existence.
Are we there? Hopefully not. Are we trending the wrong way? Sadly, perhaps so. That is for each person to answer within his or her own moral framework. But when we look at much of what we see today — especially from the president of the United States — the question becomes difficult to avoid and is worthy of our attention.