What Republicans like J.D. Vance know: Selling out to Trump pays off. Principles don’t.
These are Tudor-era lessons. Richard Rich sold out for wealth and status, Thomas More was principled and beheaded, and dissing Trump gets you shunned.
U.S. Marine veteran, Yale Law graduate, best selling author, and venture capitalist J.D. Vance’s latest political reincarnation brings to mind the contrasting careers of Richard Rich, a successful politician in Tudor England, and Saint Thomas More, a more principled but in the end less successful Tudor leader, at least in material terms.
Thomas More refused (as a matter of principle) to take King Henry the VIII’s oath of supremacy. Richard Rich, however, had no principles. Rich is assumed to have lied at More’s treason trial, resulting in More’s martyrdom and eventual sainthood, and Rich’s appointment as Wales’ attorney general. Or, as More (in the movie “A Man for All Seasons”) says to Richard Rich: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales?”
Rich switched sides many times over the course of his career and betrayed many people, eventually rising to become lord chancellor of England. The distinguished historian Hugh Trevor Roper called Rich a man “of whom nobody has ever spoken a good word.” On the other hand, Rich died of old age as a very wealthy member of the English establishment. Who says a complete lack principles doesn’t pay?
