Going low. But not staying low

Like many people both inside and outside the United States, I’m an admirer of Michelle Obama. And back in 2016, when she made the remark, I was moved by the nobility of her claim that “when they go low, we go high”.

The difficulty is that moral restraint only works when both sides recognise it as necessary. It’s self-defeating against an opponent who sees it as weakness. ç

Going High                                Going low

The problem is that we now live in the Trump era. When his opponents go high, he simply goes lower. Among the dozens of examples, one of the more recent is his insistence – which, I’m glad to say, is likely to fail – that David Hearn be prosecuted again for vandalism to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington DC. 

That’s despite the original case being dropped by the Trump-appointed prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, who humiliatingly admitted not only that Hearn was innocent of vandalism, but that the damage to the pool was the result of a botched repair job on the pool. Trump now claims not to have known the contractor responsible, but previously he had claimed in the Oval Office that he had a “guy who's unbelievable at doing swimming pools" who called him up to offer his services for the project. The contractor was appointed without competition.

Trump can’t admit it was this contractor who did a lousy job. He never owns his errors. To avoid doing so, he wants to see an innocent man pursued by the authorities for a crime those authorities have already admitted he didn’t commit.

These are not times for high-minded discourse. Michelle Obama herself seems to have recognised that. Remember her at the 2024 Democratic National Convention dealing with Trump’s claim that immigrants were taking ‘black jobs’? She replied, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”

One of the problems with ‘going high’ is that it generally demands some complexity. Many voters, and this is far from limited to the US, are keen on avoiding complexity and seeking simple answers. 

“My job is threatened because that immigrant wants it and is prepared to work for less than I get.” 

“My taxes are high because foreigners are freeloading off our aid.” 

“My company’s future is threatened because it’s being undermined by foreign enterprises exporting to us without having to pay tariffs.”

So, for instance, the Texas Republican Party is running for US Senate a man, Ken Paxton, who has been the subject of a ten-year investigation for fraud. He settled the case eventually by paying $300,000 in restitution but without pleading guilty and without the case ever being heard in court. 

Eight of his own colleagues also turned whistleblower against him. That case was eventually dropped by the authorities, but because he acted against the whistleblowers, they were eventually awarded $6.7 million – but he didn’t pay any of that. As he’s Texas Attorney General, it was the state that settled the claims.

He was even impeached by the Texas House of Representatives, with sixty of his own Republican Party voting against him. It was only because the Senate couldn’t find a two-thirds majority to support any of the charges he faced that he escaped scot free.

Anyway, I find it very difficult not to conclude that Ken Paxton has been involved in some desperately shady business. But all this is highly complex to explain (why, I’ve had trouble here) and even more difficult to understand (I can’t claim to have mastered the details myself).

So it was fascinating to see a video released by his opponent in the Texas senate race, James Tallarico, based on his once picking up someone else’s Mont Blanc pen from a metal detector. It’s an expensive pen, but the $1000 involved is as nothing compared to the $300,000 settlement for the fraud case or the $6.7 million awarded to the whistleblowers.

But the whole event was recorded on security cameras. And it’s terribly easy to understand. Tallarico’s team has made brilliant capital of it. They include the owner of the pen who, as they say, is a good guy who decided not to press charges – but who does say that he’s decided to vote for Tallarico. And the strapline of the video? It’s sheer genius: “he won’t steal your pen”.

The other case of Democrats simplifying and turning sharp – perhaps you can call it going low – was provided by John Ossoff, who’s defending his Senate seat in Georgia. He spoke out in support of the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln who’ve been suffering great privation, having spent 240 days at sea without a single port call. That’s a consequence of the meaningless, goalless and apparently endless war Trump launched against Iran.

Ossoff told a rally in Atlanta on 16 August 2026:

… while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. And above all — above all — Donald wants to get money.

Now that of course is definitely a low blow. There is no publicly available evidence that there’s actually anything reprehensible between Trump and ‘Natalie’ – that’s Natalie Harp, Trump’s adoring underling whose nickname is ‘the printer’ because her job seems to consist largely of printing out and bringing him any news that will shore up his belief that he’s the greatest president of all time. 

She also holds no elective office and isn’t a decision-maker in the administration.

But, hey, she’s a lot closer to power than, say, David Hearn is to being a dangerous radical who might want to vandalise the reflecting pool. If it’s legitimate to go after Hearn, why should it not be legitimate to go after Harp? Play the harp, I say to the Democrats, let’s have it give us the tune we need to boost morale.

After all, those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Trump has brought all this on himself. It’s vital to bring down this would-be authoritarian and that means finding his weak point and those of his supporters to undermine them.

Trump’s relationship with Natalie. Paxton’s stolen pen. They’re fair game because they’ve made such things fair game.

But there’s another saying that trumps (no pun intended) the one about the sword. It’s attributed to Gandhi. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”.

It may be necessary, in the short term, to follow Republicans onto the moral low ground. There may be no other way to beat them. But in the longer term we have to get back to the high ground Michelle Obama championed. 

That’s not going to be easy.