Trump’s Immaturity Defense

Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity.  What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong  is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts. 

This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking.  Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.

The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.

It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.

In this light, what could have been called an insanity defense can transmute into an immaturity defense.  This defense is implicit in the conduct of  juvenile justice systems—whereby, in most U.S. states, the age of criminal culpability is set at 18 years. Since Donald Trump exhibits many signs of immaturity typical of some adolescents—impulsiveness, inconsistency, utter selfishness, bullying, name-calling, failures of logic, inability to admit a mistake, refusal to apologize, flagrant narcissism, and incessant lying—you can make a case that his psychological age is somewhere in range of 12-15 years old, entitling him to be judged less culpable than an adult.

 What I propose here—that President Trump could be acquitted of wrongdoing by reason of not knowing right from wrong—is only partially facetious. An immaturity defense is not far from the fundamental argument of the President’s supporters—that he didn’t do a wrong thing, or if he did,  then “he operates differently from previous presidents.” He is not required to abide by the rules because he doesn’t understand them—or doesn’t understand why the rules are necessary.

Amoral psychopaths are regularly found guilty even though they have no internal sense of right and wrong, because they are aware of what the society in which they live believes to be right and wrong, and are conscious of stepping over the boundaries set by others.  The Trump case is more complicated, because (1) his internal moral compass does have some affinity with a normal adult’s, even though it rarely points north, while (2) his awareness of what others believe to be right and wrong is fluid enough that he can claim his conversation with Ukraine’s President Zelensky is “perfect,” and expect that someone—maybe a lot of people?—will believe him.

Today (November 1; I began this post several days ago) it was revealed that some Republican senators are willing to acknowledge that there was a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s and Zelensky’s colloquy, but that they questioned whether it rose to the level demanding removal of Trump from office.  This is a tacit exercise of the immaturity defense.  If Barack Obama  or Hillary Clinton had done something similar, it would be impeachable because they are rational, mature adults who  possess both an internal moral compass aligned with that of most of us, and an awareness of what the societal boundaries are—they know right from wrong on two different levels.

The jury may face an institutional quandary

The jury, in the impeachment case, is the U.S. Senate, to decide whether to remove the President from office. Impeachment by the House is a foregone conclusion.  But, let’s just suppose (this is what scientists refer to as a “thought experiment”*) all of the Senators were perfectly objective and concluded the President had committed an abuse of power,**  they would still face a terrible quandary: if they find the President not guilty by reasons of not knowing right from wrong, then does that mean he should continue in office, and continue to abuse, corrupt and despoil it? Surely, murderous amoral psychopaths are removed from the public sphere without widespread disruption, but in Trump’s case the unprecedented removal of an elected official from the presidency represents a disruption to the system that would reverberate throughout the institutions of government for years to come. This is the second, institutional prong of the Republicans’ argument: if this duly elected official to the highest office in the land can be removed for an unintended transgression—a bad thing he did because he didn’t know any better, and it wasn’t all that bad anyway—then we’ve started down a slippery political slope.

No matter how loathsome you find this argument, it makes some institutional sense.  It would make even more sense if this particular office-holder was not busy willy-nilly tearing down the institutions themselves.  And there is the quandary for the jury—the prospect of undermining the institutions while making a show of  preserving them.

You already know how you’d vote.  But you weren’t elected to office, were you?

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Footnotes:

* On thought experiments: Einstein’s Theor(ies) of Relativity—both the “Special” which most of us sort-of understand, and the “General” which only a few top-notch minds understand (and even they cannot solve the equations on account of the multiplicity of variables in the real world)—began as thought experiments. The mathematics came later, stretched Einstein’s mathematical ability to its limits, and forced him to ask for help.

** OK, I’m leftward biased but if he didn’t then IMHO all logic flies out the window.