There’s a famous line in President Donald Trump’s real estate manifesto, The Art of the Deal, where he posits an incompatibility between public ethics and the kind of personal loyalty his McCarthyite mentor Roy Cohn supposedly exhibited. Cohn, Trump wrote, would “go to bat for you, even if he privately disagreed with your view, and even if defending you wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him.... Just compare that with all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They think only about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem.”

In the real world, the tension Trump hints at between playing by the rules and playing for a team aren’t nearly as severe as he implies. But the idea that integrity and tribalism are mutually exclusive moral codes is an enormously powerful one. I believe it is the source of Trump’s greatest strength and weakness in his unexpected stint at the highest level of public service. It speaks to one of the questions bedeviling American politics as the Trump-Russia collusion scandal boils over: Why do his core supporters not seem to care about conduct that is so obviously beneath the standards we have set, through law and custom, for the presidency?

The key to piercing the filter through which Trump loyalists view the Russia scandal isn’t to stress the importance of the standards, but to show how the scandal itself reveals that Trump doesn’t live by his own code.

There is no shortage of reasons people should care about the Trump-Russia story. In an exhaustive Vox article Monday, Matthew Yglesias placed the collusion scandal in the larger frame of Trump’s penchant for self-dealing. Trump promised on the campaign trail to redirect his personal greed into the service of the American people, but in truth, “Trump is still just plain old-fashioned greedy.” As a result, he’s abandoned nearly all of his populist policy positions, merged the presidency with his business to line his pockets at the public’s expense, and fired the FBI director for investigating crimes that had real victims.

This is a fully persuasive argument if you already place a high premium on integrity, but it doesn’t adequately flatter the biases of those who don’t already know why they should care about the Russia scandal.