The undoing of Trump presidency: Complete lack of moral character

“There is a great wave of moral force moving through the world and every man who opposes himself to that wave will go down in disgrace.”

The words of US president Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of the Great War. It is, perhaps, unlikely that Donald Trump will have read, let alone understood, those words — but he should.

It was the moral force of its Founding Fathers as much as the military genius of George Washington that created the United States. It was moral more than military or economic force that made it into a great nation, respected and admired throughout the world.

It was moral force, as marshaled by Abraham Lincoln, that defeated slavery. It was moral force that drew up the Marshall Plan in which the US gave more than $12bn in economic assistance to help rebuild European economies after the Second World War.

It was the sanctions that follow from moral as well as legal breaches that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 in the wake of Watergate. The same goes for the impeachment by the House of Representative of Bill Clinton in 1998 for lying to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. His presidency survived the process but his reputation never fully recovered.

Indeed, polls following the 2000 presidential election showed that the single most significant reason people voted for George W Bush was for his moral character.

A lack of honesty and integrity were also reasons cited for the failure of Hilary Clinton’s campaign. It is ironic, therefore, that the man who beat her to the job appears to exhibit no moral character whatsoever.

That may be his undoing, as Donald Trump stands accused of conspiring to commit election campaign finance fraud, with two of his closest aides facing prison.

The cases of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his longtime fixer, attorney Michael Cohen, will boost prosecutor Robert Mueller’s efforts to prove that Trump sought to obstruct his investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Cohen has admitted to charges that include making illegal campaign contributions, testifying that he acted “in co-ordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office”, putting Trump in legal jeopardy.

Trump may continue to get away with calling the Mueller investigation a witch hunt but Cohen has implicated the president in a felony, declaring that Trump himself ordered hush payments to two former girlfriends in order to influence the election. That is a clear ground for impeachment, a process designed to protect the dignity of the presidency.

While President Trump might not be familiar with the erudition of Woodrow Wilson, he most likely has heard of the phrase “the buck stops here” popularised by president Harry Truman, who kept a sign with those words on his desk in the Oval Office. It was a signal to others that the holder of the office takes full responsibility for decisions of government.