Last year, Christian conservatives had serious reservations about Donald Trump. I was among them. But many of us voted for him anyway. For most, the calculation was straightforward. The end—protecting ourselves, our children, and our country from an increasingly hostile ­progressivism—justified the means, the Trump presidency. This raises a crucial question: May Christians make such a calculation? Or did those of us who voted for Trump on those terms forfeit our Christian principles?

St. Paul warns us that we are not to do evil that good might come, which means we should not endorse a ­wicked political leader, even if he holds out the promise of forestalling greater evils. This focuses the question about voting for Trump: Is he an evil politician? Some think it is obvious that Trump is a man without principle. This, many assume, is the very definition of a wicked political leader. Machiavelli, however, famously argued that no leader in the real world of politics can let principle get in the way of the exercise of power. So we return to Trump: Assuming he is a Machiavellian in his approach to power, may Christians support him?

In truth, Machiavelli’s teaching on power and principle is complicated. On the one hand, there is a benign Machiavelli, the advocate of a tough-minded but humane power politics. On the other hand, there is the dark Machiavelli, who claimed that political leaders cannot be bound by any moral standards. This is the ­Machiavelli who, in the words of Leo Strauss, might be seen as a “teacher of evil.”

It’s reasonable to see Trump as a benign Machiavellian. Machiavelli revolutionized political philosophy—and laid the groundwork for modern politics—by emphasizing self-interest as the dominant passion in human nature and the fundamental principle of political life. “It is,” he famously observed, “a thing truly very natural and ordinary to desire to acquire.”

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