Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?
Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity. What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts.
This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking. Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.
The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.
It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.