I have a number of friends who say they are willing to tolerate Donald Trump's obnoxious behavior in return for policies he's enacted that they agree with, thereby providing a fairly succinct definition of what has been called the "transactional" approach to politics.
My response is to claim that character is ultimately more important than policy because policy can be changed (and likely will be, jarringly, by the next Democrat in the White House), whereas character, at least for Trump, at this late point, cannot.
As such, I've always felt that character and the kind of integrity that goes with it constitute necessary if not sufficient qualities for a president.
Only when that box, the character and temperament one, is checked off (and it used to be a lot easier to do that) can we move to assessing where competing candidates' ideological inclinations and policy proposals would take the nation, with, in my case, a decided preference for those who would take it in a more classical liberal (now misleadingly known as "conservative") direction.
This is another way of saying a good person with political views I generally disagree with is more trustworthy and thus preferable in the...
Source: https://www.newstribune.com/news/2026/feb/23/commentary-deal-with-the-devil/
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