Stop admiring misconduct
“I’m not for Trump, but you have to admit: he campaigned brilliantly!” These are the kinds of comments you hear regularly in response to Trump’s election victory. It’s reminiscent of the admiration for a chess player who wins by secretly moving chess pieces when his opponent isn’t looking. Is that ‘brilliant play’? Of course not. Yet a former president who spread more than 30,000 demonstrable lies during his term is praised for his ‘strategic insight’. This perverse logic, in which effectiveness is confused with excellence, is eroding the foundations of the American democratic constitutional state. And that of other countries if we're not careful and stop admiring misconduct.