American Politics Just Lost Something Major. Both Sides Will Suffer.

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“Having honor means being entitled to respect,” philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes in his seminal book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Honor involves both doing right for the sake of doing right—being a person of integrity and high moral values—and also doing right because to do wrong would mar one’s reputation, and crucially, decrease one’s standing in the community. Honor, he writes, is a code adhered to and socially enforced by groups, and while it may differ between identities (honor may be different for a soldier vs. a civilian or a man vs. a woman) and can demand acts of profound immorality in its service (honor killings, for example), it can also function as a moralizing force that demands prosocial behavior and the treating of others with dignity. He writes that “if you want to know whether a society has a concern with honor, look first to see whether people there think anyone has a right to be treated with respect. The next thing to look for is whether that right of respect is granted on the basis of a set of shared norms, a code. An honor code says how people of certain identities can gain the right of respect, how they can lose it, and how having and losing honor changes the way they should be treated.”

Much has been written about President Donald Trump’s lack of integrity, lack of morals, lack of shame. But as the president demands that his party redraw congressional districts in the states they control so that they might undermine public will and maintain their own majority—so that, to put a finer point on it, they might cheat to win—what I see is a partywide, and increasingly countrywide, end of a long-held code of honor. Trump and his MAGA-fied GOP have broken American institutions, norms, and even laws. And in a remarkably short period, Trump’s own lack of honor has swallowed up the code that once shaped American public life, replacing it with something more expedient, and far hollower.

Right now, Trump is worried that his party is going to lose big in the 2026 midterm elections. He is an unpopular president, with approval ratings well below those of nearly every president in the last two decades at this point in his term—the only president who was less popular was Donald Trump in his first term. Voters were so angry back in March that the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Republican House members to stop holding town halls. Since then, Trump has pushed through a variety of wildly unpopular policies, including Medicaid cuts and inflationary tariffs.

But it’s not enough for Republicans to simply stop interacting with voters in public. Trump wants his party in power, whether they’ve earned the votes to get there or not. That’s why he has told the leaders of conservative states to redraw their congressional maps in advance of the midterms, to give the GOP an unearned advantage. Gerrymandering is nothing new, and is far from a Republican-only endeavor. But congressional maps are traditionally redrawn once a decade, in theory to account for changes in population (in practice, both parties try to secure electoral advantages). Now, Trump wants to remake the maps in states where he won, well outside of the normal procedures, specifically because he’s afraid of losing and wants to game the system rather than implement the kind of popular agenda that might let his party win. And at least some members of his party are going along with it.

In Texas, Democratic lawmakers have fled the state to deny the quorum necessary to pass a new redistricting law that would likely lose Democrats five House seats. The law will likely eventually pass anyway, but Texas Democrats say they needed to take a public stand, and so they’ve decamped, largely to Illinois. And in response, powerful Republicans have radically escalated. Sen. John Cornyn has said that the FBI should go arrest the Democrats who left the state—and that FBI Director Kash Patel has agreed to help local law enforcement go after them. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (a man with his own colorful legal history) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are both attempting to remove some of them from office, and have threatened groups supporting them with investigation.

And the redistricting showdowns may extend far beyond Texas. Trump wants to see red-state Republicans redraw their maps far and wide. In response, Democratic leaders of deep-blue states are threatening to redistrict their states to give their party an advantage and maintain some semblance of a balance in the House. It’s a disreputable but perhaps inevitable result of trying to compete in a game where your opponent refuses to abide by the rules, or unilaterally changes them midway through: “If there’s going to be a Donald Trump race to the bottom,” said Texas Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, “then we’re going to see them at the finish line.”

It is hard to argue that Democrats should continue playing an unwinnable game on a field Republicans have unapologetically tipped in their favor. Key to everything from sporting events to elections to legal battles is an agreed-upon set of rules and a fair process. A party may not like the outcome or agree with every call made by a ref or a judge, but if the rules are clear and followed, we generally accept the outcome. Here, Trump and his Republican Party are the equivalent of a soccer team saying: Actually, we’ve rewritten the rules, and they now say that we can put 15 players on the field at our home games, and you can’t. It’s hard to blame Democrats who say it would be stupid for them to compete with the standard 11 in defense of principles their opponent refuses to abide by.

But it’s also a loss for everyone—Democrats, Republicans, and the entire concept of fair play and honorable competition.

None of this is to suggest that American politicians were universally upstanding citizens before Trump. It to say that, per Attiah, there were some agreed-upon rules for “how people of certain identities can gain the right of respect, how they can lose it, and how having and losing honor changes the way they should be treated.” It seems almost quaint now to remember the nation-shaking news of Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with a White House intern, and how much of the anger came not just from his breaking his marital vows, but from his lying to the American public. Being honorable did not necessarily mean being electable—just ask Jimmy Carter—and it doesn’t mean having good or generous politics. It didn’t even mean telling the truth all the time; that politicians lie is hardly breaking news.

But the political honor code did impose costs on making things up wholesale, on lying shamelessly, on behaving uncivilly (Rep. Joe Wilson was widely criticized for yelling “You lie!” during Barack Obama’s State of the Union address), and certainly on cheating and stealing (just ask Richard Nixon). It rewarded courage, both from people who served in the armed forces and from those who struck independent stances (John McCain is the chief example). Trump didn’t kill off this code by himself; the Republican Party has spent many years shaving away at it. And there were plenty of problems with this honor code, which often rewarded those who behaved politely but legislated cruelly. Political life without it, though, is far worse.

Trump is willing to cheat because he is a man without honor, integrity, morals, or respect (for himself and others alike). One wonders if Trump understands what concepts like “respect” and “esteem” even mean, absent power and dominance. An honor code only applies if everyone involved understands the unwritten rules. Trump does not.

He clearly admires and perhaps even envies those who crush others in the service of their own power—the Vladimir Putins and Kim Jong Uns of the world—but does not seem to believe that any other person on the planet is entitled to be treated with respect. He seems to hold very little regard for those who take harder roads out of principle, who stand for something beyond their own self-interest. These people seem, even, to disgust and emotionally trigger him, as evidenced by his shocking dressing-down of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky when Zelensky visited the White House.

He is willing to cheat openly and publicly, and demand others cheat openly and publicly, because the idea that a person might be respected or esteemed for just, virtuous, or brave acts is foreign to him. He seems to hold himself to no moral standard, and seems unable to grasp why anyone else would have moral standards for themselves. He affords himself no regard or esteem for behaving well nor regret or shame for behaving poorly, and seemingly takes no personal satisfaction from doing the right thing. He feels entitled to total power no matter his behavior. He is satisfied only if he wins, believes his winning is the only legitimate outcome, and believes his wins should be total and infinite.

“I won Texas,” Trump said on CNBC. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”

A key component of democratic elections is that no candidate is entitled to a victory or a particular seat; they must compete for it. No single win means winning in perpetuity, and winning an election does not mean one has secured total power. But Trump is a man of bottomless entitlement, and no correlating sense of obligation. If, as Appiah writes, “having honor means being entitled to respect,” Trump doesn’t just live by a different code—there is no code of any kind. Trump lives in the pursuit of power and wealth, seeing any person who makes any demand of him or who does not bend to him as an enemy to be vanquished. The idea that something must be earned is unfamiliar; that it might feel better to earn something rather than to grab it incomprehensible. In his estimation, things are only taken, and usually from suckers and losers. He cheats constantly and with little apparent embarrassment—he does not hide his cheating well, and has in fact made entire campaigns of it. He has allegedly cheated on all three of his wives, cheated people who worked for him, tried to steal an election and then made it a rallying cry. The man’s favorite hobby is golf, and he has been accused of shamelessly cheating at that, too.

Trump cares about his reputation, but only insofar as he believes he is entitled to admiration and is therefore enraged when he is mocked or doubted; as long as he surrounds himself with people who tell him he is beloved, and as long as those people are willing to bend reality to his desires, he is content. Less-than-ideal jobs numbers? Claim they’re “rigged” and fire one of the economists who produced them. Lost an election? Claim it was stolen and demand that public servants change the numbers in your favor.

Insisting that reality simply isn’t real—numbers invented, elections taken—is an act of total shamelessness, the kind of behavior that most people are embarrassed to engage in. Shame is also the enforcement mechanism of honor. Societies have formal rules and laws, customs and norms. Honor codes, which apply not just to whole societies but to specific groups within them, are enforced externally with social opprobrium, and internally by shame. Trump, to the surprise of even many in his own party, has been censured by neither. And so more in his party, and on the left as well, are following suit. Not necessarily by behaving as poorly, but by disregarding the strictures of honorable behavior.

Trump is famously a man without shame, but with plenty of what Appiah deems its opposite, which is pride. (Brené Brown’s contention that the opposite of shame is actually empathy seems almost comically inapt here.) Trumpian pride, though, comes not from actual accomplishments, but an unadulterated narcissism that creates a congratulatory feedback loop: Trump is a great man who is therefore entitled to great power, and anyone who says otherwise is lying, and any challenge to that power is illegitimate, and any act in defense is rightful, and Trump’s greatness is confirmed by both his great power and the existence of those who would try to take it from him. He is both the great savior and the perpetual victim. If there is a code here, it is one of entitlement, about as far from honor as it gets.

At times, the honor code of politicians and public servants has held, even against Trumpian pressure. In 2020, after Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Raffensperger stood firm and said no, at great personal cost. But that code has been obliterated as the Republicans willing to stand up to Trump have either been pushed out or left in disgust (or, perhaps, fear of losing).

“A person with integrity will care that she lives up to her ideals,” Attiah writes. “If she succeeds, we may owe her our respect. But caring to do right is not the same thing as caring to be worthy of respect; it is the concern for respect that connects living well with our place in a social world. Honor takes integrity public.”

Honor also requires a public, or at least a group, that cares about integrity. Today’s GOP is clear that, like Trump, they believe integrity to be for suckers and losers, and they are willing to do what it takes to win at all costs.

Democrats have little choice now but to play on the slanted fields Republicans have created, and retaliate by advantaging themselves on their home turf. This will come at a high cost to reforms Democrats have pushed for. But Republicans have much to lose, too. They have also benefited from America’s democratic traditions, from our free and fair elections, and from the stability that comes when there is a norm of fair play.

Throwing one’s lot in with the dishonest and dishonorable may mean short-term wins, but if you look at those who have submitted to Trump’s demands, you’ll see a lot of people who have been disgraced, disbarred, sometimes imprisoned, and often turned on by Trump himself. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the president is elderly and his time as the charismatic and unquestioned leader of the MAGA movement will come to an end, leaving in his place a party made up almost entirely of cheaters, grifters, sycophants, and people who have either abandoned their integrity or never had it to begin with—a party of the dishonorable. The Republicans going along with this latest scheme would do well to remember the old saw: There is no honor among thieves.

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