Can America Escape the Cycle of Vicemaxxing?

Donald Trump did not invent political corruption. But he may be accelerating something more dangerous: the collapse of universal moral standards into a culture of endless special exceptions.

Editors note: I really did not want to write this essay. Every time I wanted to write something to address political corruption under Donald Trump, I thought: what is there to say about this subject beyond the fact that it is extremely bad? But I finally broke down when all of the following things happened in a 48-hour period:

• An IRS audit of Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have cost him more than $100 million, was curiously wiped away in an agreement between the president’s own Justice and Treasury Departments.

• The Justice Department created a $1.8 billion slush fund that the president can use to pay out to his friends, including lawbreaking January 6 rioters.

• The president used his influence over the IRS to guarantee “immunity” from all ongoing tax investigations into his family.

• The Wall Street Journal reported on nearly $1 billion worth of suspicious commodity trades made just minutes before Trump’s social-media posts about the Iran War caused oil prices to plummet, signaling a possible apperance of insider trading tied to the president’s posts.

Again and again, the president has taken the federal government in his hands, turned it upside down like a child’s piggy bank, and smacked it on the side until billions of dollars poured out of the hole in its back. As Republicans excuse his behavior by alleging misdeeds by the other side, I fear that a warped philosophy of amorality is settling over American politics, where fewer people are arguing for universal principles of decency and more people are perfectly comfortable justifying their own side’s uninterrupted immorality by insisting on the enduring presence of a greater evil on the other side.

This is no way to build a world.

After years of conservatives criticizing the left for “virtue signaling”—that is, cravenly performing a version of virtue for public approval—we now have something even worse than its opposite. The president and his allies are not merely vice-signaling. By empowering a figure who is oblivious to virtue and choosing to ignore his crescendoing depravity, we are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality.

This is the age of vicemaxxing. The question is whether this is our new normal—or, I hope, the sort of cultural overreach that shocks our collective conscience and sets the stage for a more decent politics.

America in the Age of Vicemaxxing

Photo by Ana Bórquez on Unsplash

1. People are good

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes that we can discern “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” by listening to the funny things people say when they argue with one another.

They say things like “that’s my seat, I was here first.” They say “come on, you promised.” They appeal to a moral principle.

What most interests Lewis about these quarrels is that—unless the fight is happening on a playground among cruel children, or in a prison yard among psychopaths—the other person in the fight usually accepts the principle. He rarely says, “I stole this seat because I’m stronger than you,” or “I promised, but promises are for losers.” Rather, the misbehaving person defends his behavior, not by arguing against the standard, but rather by arguing for a “special reason” or excuse to depart from the standard. They say, “I thought you’d gotten up from your seat, and now I’m all settled,” or they claim something has changed since the promise was made.

People behaving badly rarely argue that badness is defensible on its own terms. More often, they argue that the moral standard of goodness broadly applies—just not in this case. To Lewis, the basis of faith and goodness balances on the tip of one idea: Deep down, the soul of humanity is endowed with a glowing kernel of decency, a shared understanding of basic right and wrong.

Some might call this thing herd psychology, or culture. Some might call it evolutionary eusociality, or biology. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis calls it god. I don’t know what to call it. But what we call it is not so important as the fact that it exists. Morality presses on us, even when we pretend it cannot touch us. It’s there, even when people pretend that they are too special to hear it. Morality feels real, because it is. Goodness exists.

2. Trump is bad

Donald Trump is not immoral. The adjective is close but several letters off. The better word is amoral, and the difference matters. His calamitous sense of narcissistic victimhood means he cannot see principles in the first place, and he encourages those around him to imagine that the principles are fake. Ethics whizz past Trump the way sonar waves and high-pitched dog whistles evade the umwelts of ordinary people. The left-wing writer John Ganz put it this way:

His entire notion of the world comes down to personal relationships and he personalizes every concept and event. If the market goes down, someone is trying to screw you, personally. If it goes up, and you benefit, it’s because you’re smart.

Or consider the testimony of a very different source who came to the exact same conclusion. Here’s Steve Bannon from Michael Wolff’s 2017 bestseller Fire and Fury:

Bannon saw again the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was between you and someone else who wanted what you had.

Fortified within the armor of his amorality, Trump kicked off his second presidency with an astonishing run of ethically indefensible nonsense:

• Taking crypto money from desperate followers, then taking medicine from dying children: In January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency meme coin, which allowed his family to earn more than $100 million from trading fees even as more than 800,000 investors lost more than $2 billion, making it one of the most nakedly extractive presidential self-enrichment schemes in history. Three days later, the president signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, resulting in the estimated death of more than 500,000 people around the world, most of them children.

• Soliciting billionaire donations in exchange for pardons and tax cuts, while cutting health care for the poor: In March, the Trump family sought an investment from the crypto firm Binance; six months later, the president pardoned the company’s founder Changpeng Zhao, whose conviction of money laundering included one of the largest corporate penalties in history. Two weeks later, Trump pardoned the businessman Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of securities and wire fraud, several months after the Miltons donated millions of dollars to his campaign. Four weeks after that, in April, Trump pardoned the Florida tax offender Paul Walczak soon after his wife attended a $1 million fundraising dinner for the president. In July, Trump signed into law a tax cut that will save the top 0.1 percent of Americans about $300,000 a year. The law includes the largest reduction in health care spending on the poor in American history.

• Gutting government oversight while engaging in blatant corruption: In May, Trump thanked the largest buyers of $TRUMP meme coin with a private dinner at a Virginia golf club without lobbying registrations or an ethics review. Trump has fired the head of the US Office of Special Counsel, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, and more than a dozen inspectors general across federal agencies, after handing the FBI over to a conspiracy theorist and personal friend with no record in law enforcement.

In these paragraphs and juxtapositions, one can see Trumpism for what it is—not so much an ideology, or theory of a political economy, or even a political cause, but rather a pure machine of self-enrichment, one that seeks to maximize glory and income for the president, with a casual indifference or outright hostility toward any life form that doesn’t present itself as a supine resource for the extraction of wealth and power.

The classic defense of Trump’s behavior “…but Democrats are also bad” does not make contact with any ethical principle. It is rather a moral blank check made out to the administration that promises to cover the cost of any transgression.

To point out that Trump’s lurid corruption has been bad sounds almost pathetic in its understatement. But I am trying to make a more solid point: I believe that the above paragraphs represent the kind of bad and wrong that everybody knows is bad and wrong. And by everybody, I mean not only progressive Boomers neurally tethered to primetime MSNBC but also the entire MAGA electorate. Everybody knows, in some part of their heart, soul, prefrontal cortex, or whatever, that there is no moral explanation possible for the stories I have just offered you.

How does Trump get away with it?

As Lewis writes, extraordinary efforts to bend morality require extraordinary excuses. While Trump himself may be uniquely amoral—Lewis’s frame doesn’t seem to quite touch him—the work of excuse-making falls to his followers. To justify the rise of a kleptocratic king, conservatives have to convince themselves that the threat from Trump’s enemies is so existential that it justifies their own side’s actions.

And so, they do.

In his new book The Political Vise, the Republican operative John Tillman argues that the “radical left” has commandeered America’s leading institutions in a despotic attempt remake the country as a radical woke-socialist dystopia. Like similar conceits—c.f., the Cathedral, “the Flight 93 election”—the construct of The Vise serves the purpose of “imagining the Democrats, not as a rival coalition with opposing policies, but as a unified, impersonal force that is always on the precipice of totalitarian control,” the Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait wrote. The imminence of this threat leaves Republicans with no choice: They must “destroy that which threatens to destroy them”—and at all costs.

Any time I raise the issue of Trump’s corruption online, the first response is invariably something along the lines of “but Biden was also bad.” This is not a tendency limited to online posting. It’s the standard response among Republican defenders of the administration:

• Asked about the president pardoning January 6 rioters, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said: “Look at Biden and his pardons. Are you kidding me?”

• Asked about Trump using his presidency to become a cryptocurrency scion, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters, “I’ll talk to you only about [Biden’s] pardons.”

• Asked on CNBC about conflicts of interest in the family business, Eric Trump said, “Wwe’re far from Hunter Biden.”

The reasoning “…but Biden was also bad” does not make contact with an ethical principle. It is a moral blank check made out to the administration that promises to cover the cost of any transgression. The presumption that the evils of our enemies can justify any indecency is the opposite of a moral principle. “I think anyone who follows politics can tell there are no principles left in my party,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “Even for people who agree with some of the stuff the president is doing, if you are honest with yourself, you know it is not based on principle.”

3. The post-virtue style of politics

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the modern world had lost the shared moral language once provided by virtue systems, such as religion. Several months ago, I sat with a reading group to discuss the opening chapters of the book and admitted that I didn’t quite get it. “Were our ancestors really so virtuous?” I said. “If past generations of institutionalized racism, misogyny, bigotry, and violence possessed a language of virtue, of what use is that language?” I still think I was right about the egregious sins of our parents and grandparents. But I now think that MacIntyre was right, too, and it took a dash of C. S. Lewis to see just how right. In this distrustful, anti-establishment, post-institutional age, too many public conversations about right and wrong excuse the behavior of preferred groups rather than articulate a theory of virtue that extends across all groups.

Several weeks ago, the New York Times rocked the Internet with a controversial interview with the commentator Hasan Piker and the journalist Jia Tolentino, in which they described and tacitly defended the practice of stealing small things from big corporations. Tolentino admitted to pocketing a few lemons from Whole Foods, and Piker approved.

It would be absurd to equate the substance of these comments with Trump’s corruption; a snagged Whole Foods lemon is not a $1.8 billion pot of public funds to dole out to lawbreaking rioters. I am not interested in piling onto the personal attacks that followed this conversation so much as I want us to listen closely to the precise way they talked about virtue. “The rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I?” the interviewer Nadja Spiegelman said. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker said.

Do you hear it? Surely, C. S. Lewis’s ears would have perked up. It’s special excuses all the way down. Rather than begin with a universal imperative (“Stealing is bad, and it would be bad if everyone stole all the time”), followed by a personal decision (“therefore, I don’t steal”), joined by a public policy recommendation (“therefore, I expect others in society to do the same”), you have a series of private justifications for bad behavior, each excused by the fact that some larger societal force is also bad. Instead of “I Play By the Rules, So I Expect the Rich to Do the Same,” the article’s headline offered the perfect inversion: “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules, So Why Should I?” Out with universalist ethics, and in with individualist excuses for doing what you want.

I am not lumping Tolentino, Piker, and Spiegelman into the same bucket as the spineless corruption-excusers who sit in Congress. I am rather asking that we hear the similarities in the formal logic of their statements: the in-group’s bad behavior is justified so long as the out-group’s behavior is appropriately condemned.

My fear is that the post-virtue style of politics is here to stay. The moral blank check of “we don’t have to argue for our cause, so long as we can argue that our counterparty is worse” might prove too tantalizing for the next generation of conservatives, centrists, liberals, and leftists to resist when they hold the reins of power.

Another way is possible. In April, the political writer Isaac Saul, who has exhaustively documented Trump’s corruption, published an essay entitled “Decency is about to make a comeback.” “Obscenity feels like it has become the norm,” Saul wrote. But just as culture is the continual handoff between trend and countertrend—he notes that the death of malls seems to be reversing itself—perhaps the lurid corruption of our age will inspire a countermovement that successfully returns government to the rule of law. Like a rubber band pulled all the way back, maybe the tensions within vicemaxxing politics will spring us forward in the opposite direction.

What would a revolution of decency look like? I don’t know. I am not ready to predict the imminence of a new social gospel that extends itself across American life. I am only ready to hope for it.

Like Lewis, I think that people know good and bad. A right society cannot build itself on a pile of wrongs, and a country cannot stand on a heap of special excuses that reserve for every insider the right to misbehave on account of some external sin. Maybe one day, when enough people get tired of making excuses for the inexcusable, some leader or group will say the thing that nobody currently wants to say: “We are better than this.” And maybe it will feel good to hear it, too, because it is the rarest thing: the truth.