A decade ago, a famous and successful investor told me that “integrity lowers the cost of capital.” We were talking about Donald Trump at the time, and this Wall Street wizard was explaining why then-candidate Trump had so much trouble borrowing money from domestic capital markets. His point was that the people who knew Trump best had been screwed, cheated or misled by him so many times, they didn’t think he was a good credit risk. If you’re honest and straightforward in business, my friend explained, you earn trust and that trust has real value.
I think about that point often. But never more so than in the last few weeks.
In all of the debates about foreign policy — where people throw around terms like realism, internationalism, isolationism, nationalism, this ism, that ism — one word tends to draw eyerolls from ideologues: “honor.” Specifically national honor.
President Trump and many of his admirers believe he’s “restoring” America’s reputation on the world stage. Trump himself often says that we’ve “never been more respected.” It’s never exactly clear what he bases this on, aside from what foreign leaders purportedly tell him in private. Public opinion surveys are at best a mixed bag.
The deeper confusion is about what he means by “respect.” From the way Trump talks about geopolitics, it’s clear he equates “respect” with a Machiavellian mix of “fear,” “strength” or “power.” That is one definition. For instance, many people respect China as an economic and military power. But such respect is not synonymous with “admiration.” Everyone respects North Korea as a nuclear power. But few non-deranged people admire the Hermit Kingdom in any other way.
What’s missing is the concept of honor. One of the great critiques of the idea that economics is everything — that we are all mere Homo economicus, maximizing income to the exclusion of all else — is that people value other things: love, family, morality, integrity, faith and, yes, honor. Trump’s theory of geopolitics could be described as Patria economicus (though Latin purists might object). It’s a kind of realism that simply says the nation-state should do whatever it can to get the best deals for itself (or for the Homo economicus in Chief).
This seems to be what Trump’s getting at when he says the only thing that can constrain him on the international stage is “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
His aide, Stephen Miller, insists that “the real world” is “governed by strength … is governed by force … is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” According to this logic, we can take Greenland from Denmark — and the Greenlanders themselves — because we can. The only question is whether it will be “the easy way” or “the hard way,” as Trump recently said.
We should acknowledge the truth of this. Put aside questions of law, the Constitution or policy. It’s true we could take Greenland militarily, gangster-style. It’s also true that I can take a gun and rob my friends. Again, legality aside, the question I have is, “would that be honorable?” In Trump’s terms, the seizure of Greenland would make us more “respected,” but it would not make us more honored. We would be betraying our allies (and ideals), and not just Denmark but all of NATO, by breaking our word. For what? Territory. Territory we have every right to use by treaty already. Would we be prouder of our military once it became an instrument of mercenary conquest?
St. Augustine once asked, “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” George Washington was passionate about notions of honor and virtue. In his farewell address, he insisted that we should honor our commitments “with perfect good faith.”
An America that honors its commitments has allies who will honor theirs. An America that betrays her commitments by force or by the threat of force will find the cost of political capital exorbitantly expensive at the earliest opportunity.
The administration reads the Monroe Doctrine as a warrant for the president to do as he likes on his turf and, in Trump’s mind, Greenland is our turf. That is not how President Monroe saw things. In his first inaugural, Monroe declared, “National honor is national property of the highest value. The sentiment in the mind of every citizen is national strength. It ought therefore to be cherished.”
Most Americans are right to want their country to be powerful. But they should also want our country to be good. Aristotle believed that true honor is reserved not just for power or glory, but virtue. Those who prize virtue will find little comfort in Trump’s assurance that he is only constrained by his own morality.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.