“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” Shakespeare warns in The Merchant of Venice. The line echoes the Gospel story of Christ’s temptation, where Satan quotes the Psalms to serve his own ends. It is a reminder that even sacred words lose truth in the mouths of the self-righteous.
That came to mind this past week as I read two columns—one by David Boies in The Wall Street Journal, and another by Jim Jones in the Idaho Capital Sun. Both are seasoned advocates. Mr. Boies stands among the great trial attorneys of our time—his cross-examination of Bill Gates should serve as a master class in how precision and discipline prevail over bluster. Mr. Jones, by contrast, writes like a community organizer overwhelmed by indignation, letting sentiment substitute for substance.
Mr. Boies’ essay exemplifies legal reasoning at its best: clear predicates leading logically to conclusion. Writing on the present war with Iran, he urges that patriotism take precedence over party loyalty. He argues that Americans—especially Democrats—must assess the administration’s policy on its merits, not through the distorting lens of political animus. As Boies notes, every president since Reagan has condemned Iran’s sponsorship of terror, yet few have acted decisively. President Trump, he contends, is “doing the right thing for the United States.” To oppose action simply because of the man who leads it, Boies warns, is to confuse partisanship with principle.
That reasoned appeal to “country over party” stands in stark contrast to Mr. Jones’s emotional tirade. He imagines Abraham Lincoln returning to witness the “white nationalism, nativism, and moral decay” of today’s Republican Party. The irony is rich: Lincoln himself was branded a radical and a nativist by opponents when he helped forge the Republican coalition—an alliance of former Whigs, Know-Nothings, and anti-slavery Democrats. Lincoln’s political genius lay in building that pragmatic “fusion” on natural law and Biblical conviction, not on moral grandstanding.
If Mr. Jones understood Lincoln as more than rhetorical ornament, he would see how closely our present turbulence mirrors the 1850s. Like Lincoln, Donald Trump appealed directly to the people, bypassing elites and fractured institutions to rebuild a political mandate. The resemblance lies less in temperament than in method—each challenged stagnant orthodoxies to preserve the Republic through populist reform.
Mr. Jones invokes the Gettysburg Address to contrast Lincoln’s supposed “welcoming” of immigrants with Mr. Trump’s border policy. The history, however, is more complex. Congress did debate immigration in Lincoln’s era, eventually passing “An Act to Encourage Immigration” in 1864. It created a Commissioner of Immigration and allowed employers to advance passage money to European laborers, binding them to repay up to a year’s wages—a form of contracted labor bordering on indenture. Far from universally praised, labor unions denounced it as exploiting poor workers. Congress repealed the law just four years later.
Facts matter. Context matters. Mr. Trump is hardly the anti-immigrant caricature Mr. Jones paints. He is, after all, married to an immigrant and naturalized American—Melania Trump—the first since Louisa Adams to be First Lady. Two naturalized citizens now reside in the White House. That reality is inconvenient for those who prefer outrage to evidence.
Mr. Jones ends his column by invoking the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein to smear Trump with insinuation. For a former Attorney General and Justice, that lapse is astonishing. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? What happened to impartial justice, blind to faction?
In the end, we must ask: whom would you trust to defend your cause—David Boies or Jim Jones? Whose judgment would you want on the bench? One argues from reason; the other from resentment. The difference matters, not only in law but in the preservation of a republic founded, as Lincoln said, on the better angels of our nature.
