Pick any Trump-imposed crisis over the last year, and you’ll find prominent Democrats decrying the president’s actions with an all-too-familiar word. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump’s “hypocrisy knows no bounds” after he pardoned fraudsters while throwing “baseless allegations” of “massive fraud” at the Golden State. It was “beyond hypocritical,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in Los ­Angeles after provoking an actual insurrection in DC. The Daily Show’s Jon ­Stewart responded to the president’s ­attack on a judge who blocked the deportation of Venezuelans—after previously saying it should be illegal to criticize judges he appointed—by straining his voice like a demon doused with holy water: “The hypocrisy! It burns!”

“Hypocrisy,” like democracy, was passed down to us from the ancient Greeks. Hypokrites was a word for stage actors—different people entirely, ­beneath their masks. But allegations of two-faced dealing are endemic to American politics. Benjamin Franklin took over his brother’s newspaper after he was sanctioned for printing an “Essay against Hypocrites” about the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. (“It is far worſe dealing with ſuch religious Hypocrites, than with the moſt arrant Knave in the World.”) Thomas Jefferson later lamented, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the spread of Christianity and other religions imposed upon people through violence had made “one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Abraham Lincoln, in 1854, asserted that the existence of slavery “enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”

Then, as now, allegations of “hypocrisy” are often infused with a note of spiritual censure. Jesus, after all,........

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