Let's start by being fair, because fairness is where we always try to start. Behaving the way a president should is genuinely hard, and it is harder now than it has ever been. Every offhand comment is captured, amplified, and replayed in a 24-hour cycle that rewards the outrageous and punishes the dull. Living up to the dignity of the office under that kind of relentless scrutiny would test anyone. We should hold that thought before we criticize anyone who holds the job.
But there is a benchmark for presidential behavior, and it is worth remembering exactly where it came from. It came from the very first person to hold the office: George Washington. He set the standard, in so many ways at once, and the remarkable thing is that his benchmarks still stand today. Measured against them, the contrast with our current president is stark — and, we'd argue, that's true no matter your politics.
The Man Who Could Have Been King
Washington's greatness was never really about what he seized. It was about what he gave up. He claimed, sincerely as far as anyone can tell, not to want the office at all — and then served so well that he remains one of the very few presidents to leave as popular as he arrived.
Twice he handed back power that was his for the taking. At the end of the Revolution, as victorious commander-in-chief, he resigned his commission and went home — precisely when so many triumphant generals in newborn nations simply take control instead. King George III reportedly said that if Washington truly gave up power, he would be "the greatest man in the world." He did, and by that act arguably was. Then, as president, he walked away again — declining a third term, establishing the two-term tradition by his own restraint, and overseeing the first peaceful transfer of power to a duly elected successor in the nation's history.
And in between and after all of it, he tried simply to be a good citizen — returning to private life at Mount Vernon before his presidency, and again after it, a general and a president who kept choosing to become an ordinary man again. The through-line of his whole public life was restraint: power held lightly, and surrendered willingly.
One Hundred and Ten Rules for Governing Himself
Here is the detail we love most, because it goes to the root of everything else. As a young man, long before he governed a country, Washington copied out by hand a list of 110 "Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation." Before he ever tried to govern a nation, he worked at governing himself.
That is the origin of the benchmark, and it is not an accident that it lines up with what this movement has always cared about. The presidency is not merely a bundle of powers. It is a standard of conduct — an example deliberately set for a country and, especially, for its children. Washington understood that character is not a nicety layered on top of leadership. It is the foundation the whole thing rests on.
The Contrast Is Hard to Miss
We will say plainly what we always say: we try to hold both parties to the same standard, and there is real bad behavior to be found across the political spectrum. But it would be dishonest to pretend the current occupant of the office is anywhere near the Washington standard — and because he is the most visible leader on the planet, with the entire world watching, that gap matters more, not less.
Consider the petty end of it first. This week the president signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" in the middle of his feud with Canada — a lake whose name is more than four hundred years old, older than either country. The United States can relabel it on its own maps, but it cannot make Canada or the world accept it. It follows the earlier renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America," which the International Hydrographic Organization and Mexico still do not recognize. These are not policies. They are provocations aimed at a domestic base, and they are beneath the office Washington built.
Then there is the serious end. There are the tit-for-tat tariff escalations with our own allies — the kind we wrote about with Canada — that wreak havoc on American businesses and their employees, with the costs landing, as always, on consumers at the register. And there is a recurring pattern in which official government action lines up uncomfortably well with private family gain.
The examples are documented, and we'll let them speak. The administration has moved to roll back regulations on online gun sales while the president's eldest son holds a roughly one-percent stake in GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer that went public last year. The federal government took a ten-percent equity stake in Trilogy Metals, the mining company behind the Ambler Road project in Alaska — the very project the same administration approved, making the government both investor in and regulator of the deal. The family's cryptocurrency ventures have drawn sustained conflict-of-interest scrutiny of their own. Each of these raises the oldest question in any republic: is the office being used for the country, or for the people who happen to hold it?
And Yes — We Hold Everyone to This
To be clear and fair, this is not only one man's problem. Plenty of others in and around government, in both parties, try to exert influence and profit from public position, and they deserve to be named and called out every bit as much. We have not been shy about criticizing the left when it earns it, and we won't start being shy now.
But the president is the highest-profile example by far — the one the world watches, the one who sets the tone for everyone beneath him. When the very top of the government treats the office as a personal brand, it quietly gives everyone else permission to do the same. The standard has to start at the top, because that is where the example is set.
This Is About Character, Not Party
You do not have to share our politics, or anyone's, to feel the distance between Washington's example and today's conduct. The benchmark Washington set was never partisan. It was about character: restraint over grasping, service over self, civility over spectacle, the country over the man. Those are not Republican virtues or Democratic virtues. They are presidential ones, and they belong to no party.
We are not naive about the modern presidency. No one is going to sit down and copy 110 rules into a notebook, and the media environment is genuinely brutal. But the heart of the Washington standard is simple and timeless, and we should demand it of the next president — of every president: surrender power gracefully, tell the truth about what things cost, keep private gain out of public office, and treat the job as a trust rather than a trophy.
America deserves better leadership than this. The world deserves it. And our children and our fellow citizens deserve a better example, because they are watching, and they learn what is acceptable from what we are willing to accept. Washington understood that governing a country begins with governing yourself. Two and a half centuries later, that is still the benchmark. We should stop pretending it is optional.