Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Qatar Air Force F-15 jets perform a flyover as Air Force One is ready to depart from Al Udeid Air Base, May 15, 2025, in Doha, Qatar.
Donald Trump’s deals with his fellow sultans this week, particularly the one for a 747 that Qatar has rigged out with the kind of gold-shmeared decor he so loves, have provided some ethical challenges for Trump’s fellow Republicans—none more so than House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Speaker Johnson, after all, is a stickler for and promoter of traditional Christian ethics. Last year, he told a gaggle of reporters that he supported a newly enacted Louisiana law—drafted, he pointed out, by some of his onetime colleagues in that state’s legislature—requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. “I don’t think it’s offensive in any way,” he said. “I think it’s a positive thing.”
Some Republican members of Congress, less ostentatiously guided by the Lord’s ethical codes than their Speaker, have condemned Trump’s acceptance of Qatar’s $400 million gift. Johnson, however, has managed to craft an ethical loophole through which Trump, in his assessment, can strut. “Other nations give us gifts all the time,” he told reporters yesterday. Asked whether Trump and his family’s business dealings created ethical issues of the kind that Republicans loudly and constantly criticized in Hunter Biden’s various endeavors, Johnson explained the difference between those two cases.
Unlike Hunter’s, Trump’s dealings are “all out in the open,” he said. “I can just tell you, President Trump has nothing to hide, he’s very upfront about it. Congress has oversight responsibility, but so far as I know the ethics are all being followed.”
In other words, Trump’s shamelessness renders him immune from ethical norms and responsibilities, not to mention anti-bribery statutes. Nice work if you can get it.
Johnson is hardly the first public servant to classify ethical transgressions into two categories: OK and not OK. Whether he knows it or not, he is all but reincarnating the great Tammany ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, who once explained to an industrious New York reporter in 1905 the difference between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft.” The former, he said, was exemplified by his buying up land adjacent to a not-yet-announced major public project he’d gotten wind of. The latter was outright embezzling funds from the public till, which he’d never done. (Of course, by buying cheap and selling dear that land he’d bought up, Plunkitt had no need for anything so crude as embezzlement.)
But Ten Commandments Johnson is no mere apostle of situational ethics. By his own standards, he’s also one cardinal sinner. In the first of those Ten Commandments, the Lord plainly says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Somehow, Johnson has prostrated himself so completely before Donald Trump that the Lord has been left cooling His heels in some anteroom. Some might call that heresy; I’ll settle for bad faith.
