Pence purports to believe that “secular popular culture” corrodes that which is most important, and extols religious faith as “essential to maintaining our republic,” yet worked to make a reality-TV star who celebrated greed, Playboy , and Howard Stern—a man with no credible religious convictions—the most powerful man in the GOP and the United States.

Pence purports to lament moral relativism and to believe that moral character is essential to good leadership, but worked to empower an obviously prideful, avowedly greedy, famously lustful, sometimes wrathful billionaire who publicly bragged about adulterous trysts, appeared in a soft-core porn video, and ran an Atlantic City gambling house.

Trump is no one’s idea of a moral man.

Pence purports to champion America as the “leader of the free world,” but works on behalf of a president who extols authoritarians in Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines while denigrating allies in Europe and Canada, undermining NATO, and extending a sordid alliance with Saudi Arabia.

Pence purports to believe that “strong families” are “the foundation of a free society,” but helped to elevate and empower a twice-divorced man who was once estranged from one of his sons, gave a shock jock permission to call his daughter “a piece of ass,” and treated his first wife to tawdry tabloid stories best summed up by Mona Charen: “It requires a particular breed of lowlife to advertise the sexual superiority of one’s mistress over the mother of one’s children. That was Trump’s style.”

Pence purports to believe that integrity is a function of one’s daily habits and choices, and that character and ideals are the path to national renewal, yet he helped to elevate and continues to extol an erratic liar who insults the appearance of women, spreads conspiracy theories about rivals, and tweets in a manner that dishonors his office almost daily.

The logic of Trump’s sexist attacks

What’s an earnest young Hillsdale undergrad who is even passingly familiar with Trump’s character and past actions to make of Pence’s selection as commencement speaker, his speech, or his broader work trying to elevate, empower, and lavishly extol a flagrantly immoral president?

If one of Pence’s children or friends behaved as Trump has behaved, the vice president would be praying for the Lord to spare their immortal soul. Yet he still travels the country obsequiously praising the man.

What are we to make of that?

The most charitable explanation is that Pence is engaged in what he believes to be a utilitarian moral compromise, wherein he helps to secure great power for a morally odious man with the expectation that the man will wield power in ways that wind up benefiting the greater good.

In this telling, Hillsdale students wanting to follow Pence’s moral example might calculate who in their business career or civic life is most likely to bring about outcomes they find desirable and work to ally with and elevate that person—even if he or she regularly lies, slanders rivals with conspiracy theories, praises murderous tyrants, disrespects his spouses and children, and professes religious faith only when it might benefit him or her. If the ends are desirable, that justifies the means.