Why Trump’s Vengeful Tweeting Matters

By David French

Thursday, June 29, 2017

So, he did it again. As we’ve learned countless times since his inauguration, President Trump is the exact same person as celebrity Trump and candidate Trump. He’s crass, vicious, and petty. This morning, he tweeted this:

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

Then this:

…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

And of course, like clockwork, his loyalists rose to his defense. Online, his Twitter army exulted in his ability to “get inside the head” of his opponents and essentially adopted the line that Mika got what she deserved. Sarah Huckabee Sanders pulled a twofer, adopting victim status and trying to claim a position of strength — saying that the president “fights fire with fire.”

.@SarahHuckabee just on Fox: “People on that show have personally attacked me many times. This is a president who fights fire with fire…” pic.twitter.com/bWVKyfoQfM

— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) June 29, 2017

It’s a sad symbol of our times that one feels compelled to actually make an argument why the president is wrong here. The pitiful reality is that there are people who feel like the man who sits in the seat once occupied by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan should use his bully pulpit for schoolyard insults and vicious personal attacks. But this is what we’re reduced to. So, here goes.

First, it is simply and clearly morally wrong to attack another person like this. I’m tired of hearing people say things like, “This is not normal.” Normality isn’t the concern here. Morality is. It doesn’t matter if Mika has been “mean” to Trump. Nor does it matter that we can point to any number of angry personal attacks on Trump from others. We have to get past the idea that another person’s bad acts somehow justify “our” side’s misconduct. Morality is not so situational. Trump is under a moral obligation to treat others the way he’d like to be treated, to love his neighbor as he would love himself. Yes, he can engage in ideological and political battles, but to attack another person in such vicious terms is to cross a bright line.

Second, it’s not classist or elitist to make this moral argument. It’s no justification to argue that Trump simply speaks the way “real Americans” do, or that he’s brought into public the language that “everyone knows” people use behind closed doors. People of every social class and economic standing have the same moral responsibilities, and our society suffers when we relax those responsibilities, whether for a steelworker in a mill outside Pittsburgh or the real-estate developer in the Oval Office.

Third, even if your ethics are entirely situational and tribal, Trump’s tweets are still destructive. Attacking Mika like this doesn’t silence her or anyone at MSNBC. It doesn’t move the ball downfield on repealing Obamacare. It does, however, make more people dislike Donald Trump. It’s a misuse and abuse of the bully pulpit, all the more galling because it comes at a time when the positive parts of his agenda truly do need public champions.

Fourth, please stop with the ridiculous lie that this is the only way to beat the Left. Stop with any argument that this kind of pettiness is somehow preferable to the alleged weakness of other Republicans. There are thousands of GOP office-holders who’ve won their races (including by margins that dwarf Trump’s, even in the toughest districts and states) without resorting to Trump-like behavior. In fact, at the state level many of these same honorable and moral people are currently busy enacting reforms that the national GOP can only dream about.

The election is over. Trump isn’t running against Hillary Clinton anymore. Americans are no longer faced with the awful choice of either pulling the lever for an unfit candidate or voting for someone who has no chance of winning. If there were ever a time for Republicans to show some backbone, to tell their president that some conduct is out of bounds, it’s now, early in his first term, when he has time to turn the page and put his past misconduct in the rear-view mirror. Instead, the desire to cozy up to power, the desperate need to win each news cycle, and frantic efforts to rationalize and justify their own moral compromises mean that people continually choose to enable the president’s worst conduct.

Words still matter, and the president’s words are often reprehensible. Even those who say, “Talk to me about what he does, not what he tweets” know this to be true. How can I tell? Because these same people incessantly point to liberal words and are unceasingly outraged by liberal tweets. Indeed, they often act as if a random news anchor’s comments are somehow more consequential than the president’s. I know. I see the clickbait everywhere.

A conservative can fight for tax reform, celebrate military victories over ISIS in Mosul, and applaud Trump’s judicial appointments while also condemning Trump’s vile tweets and criticizing his impulsiveness and lack of discipline. A good conservative can even step back and take a longer view, resolving to fight for the cultural values that tribalism degrades. Presidents matter not just because of their policies but also because of their impact on the character of the people they govern. Conservatives knew that once. Do they still?

Two Princes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, June 29, 2017

The confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which currently takes the form of an embargo and the severing of diplomatic relations with Qatar by governments from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates, might be the result of a strictly local genital-measuring contest between two ambitious young men in rival royal families feeling their oats: The 37-year-old Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, is the youngest reigning monarch in the Gulf Cooperation Council and has held power only since 2013, while 31-year-old Mohammad bin Salman was named the Saudi crown prince only a week ago.

But it might well be something more.

Qatar is a tiny country with no real military and a population smaller than Brooklyn’s. It sits atop one the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all known supplies. It has long maintained a “third way” foreign-relations stance, negotiating for itself a delicate position as neither a satellite of Iran, a fellow natural-gas power, nor a supplicant to the giant next door, Saudi Arabia, with which it shares the Arabic language and the Sunni religion. The Saudis, for their part, are not quite sure they think Qatar is a real country, and they have over the years disputed the borders drawn up under British rule. In 1992, Saudi troops went into Qatar and occupied a border post at al-Khafus.

If you are wondering what is on the mind of the powers in Doha, consider that a few years ago Qatar reinstated military conscription and that its military exercises consist of preparing for a single scenario: troops pouring in down the highway from Saudi Arabia.

The public cause of the standoff between the Saudi-dominated Gulf states and Qatar is an incendiary, pro-Iran speech made by the Qatari emir during a graduation ceremony at a military academy, which was later published on an official government website. The Qataris say the document on the website was placed there by hackers, and they deny that the emir made the remarks attributed to him. A senior Qatari government official who attended the graduation in question says that not only did the emir not make the remarks, he did not in fact attend the ceremony at all.

But the Qataris have from time to time smiled in the direction of Tehran when doing so frustrated Riyadh. Qatar and Iran share exploration rights to gas fields in the Gulf. For their part, the Iranians have gone so far as to offer to sign a mutual-defense pact with Qatar, which would of course bring Iran closer to the confrontation with Saudi Arabia that some in Tehran believe is inevitable. For the moment, there are no Iranian forces in Qatar.

There are, however, at least 5,000 Turkish troops.

When the Saudi-organized coalition decided to blockade Qatar — a move that has left officials at the U.S. State Department describing themselves as “mystified” — the immediate problem was food. Qatar imports about half of its food from Saudi Arabia. Food disappeared from store shelves. In response, the ambitious Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan rode to the rescue with 121 cargo planes full of food. “We have conducted the world’s biggest airlift operation in two weeks,” the Turkish economy minister, Nihat Zeybekci, boasted. Turkey also dispatched 5,000 soldiers.

“It was like what happens in the United States before a hurricane,” says a U.S. businessman who was in Qatar at the time. He adds:

The food stock disappeared. And then, suddenly, things went back to normal. Erdogan has played this really well. But that complicates things for Saudi. Think about it: Qatar is a postage stamp of a country. It would take nothing to knock it over, and, if you take it, you get one of the world’s largest supplies of natural gas. You also take that “third way” off the table and make an example. And Saudi Arabia spends $80 billion a year on its military, more than “real countries” like Russia and France. But Turkey has a real military and can bring real forces to bear. This probably won’t blow up, but between these two young leaders, it could.

Before 9/11, Saudi Arabia was a fairly big military spender, but since that time it has stepped up and is now making massive investments in its national arsenal, developing the world’s third-largest military budget, behind only the United States and China according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It spent $82 billion on its military in 2015 — or $2,600 per capita. The United States spends about $1,800 per capita, while Russia spends $465 per capita and China only $100 per capita.

Saudi’s crown prince is a reformer internally and assertive externally: He has backed moves to limit the power of the religious police and to diversify the Saudi economy. He also has been a critical advocate of the Saudi–United Arab Emirates war in Yemen, which has not been going well. He is looking to flex his muscles, and he may very well prevail over Qatar without having to fire a shot, so disproportionate is the power and influence of the two countries.

What is worth noting is that the Saudi military buildup took place partly under the presidency of George W. Bush but mainly under the presidency of Barack Obama, who held as a headline diplomatic priority reaching an agreement with Tehran regarding the Iranian nuclear program. The Saudis complained about the Iran deal, but not nearly as energetically as might have been expected. The Obama administration’s support for the Saudi war in Yemen was part of the price paid for Saudi acquiescence to the Iran deal. Facilitating the Saudi military buildup — which is, in spite of the kingdom’s famous wealth, still being partially financed with U.S. military aid — may very well be another.

The Middle East is involved in a new round of the Great Game. It is not clear that the Trump administration knows how to play. After being fêted and celebrated by the Saudi royals, Trump took to Twitter to brag about his being the catalyst of the Saudi-led embargo of Qatar. In reality, that project almost certainly was being organized behind the scenes long before the reports of the Qatari emir’s pro-Iran speech, and the U.S. government’s mystified response to it suggests very strongly that Washington was the last to know.

Strictly local? Maybe not, after all.

The Supreme Court Still Knows How to Find a Consensus

By Max Bloom

Thursday, June 29, 2017

One popular school of thought holds that the Supreme Court is by now effectively a political institution, that Democratic appointees on the Court sit there with the purpose of enacting Democratic policies and Republican appointees intend to enact Republican policies. In this telling, it is naïve to think that justices should be selected by their commitment to a particular approach to jurisprudence — unless that approach is to blindly support the legislation of one particular party. It is this school of thought at work when, for instance, commentators claim that a particular decision is “heartless” and ignore the question of whether or not it is good law; it is this school of thought at work when writers suggest that the Supreme Court could use a justice or two without a legal background, or when law professors suggest that perhaps the Constitution doesn’t have very much to do with jurisprudence anymore.

This school of thought is wrong. It is not merely normatively wrong — as if there were no benefit in having a stable, democratically established basis for law — but wrong as a descriptive account of how the Supreme Court operates. The Supreme Court is at times partisan, and the most hot-button issues do tend to produce 5–4 or 6–3 votes, but the vast majority of cases before the Supreme Court hinge on complicated cases of law that require the full expertise of the justices. Many of these cases are decided unanimously. In fact, a surprising number of politically contentious cases are decided unanimously or close to unanimously.

The most recent term, in fact, was the least partisan since the middle of the 20th century. Over half of the cases were unanimous, and only 14 percent were decided by a 5–3 or 5–4 split. To some degree, this can be attributed to the fact that the Court had only eight justices for much of the term, meaning the justices had to work to avoid tie votes, or to the relatively inconsequential roster of cases the Court dealt with. But even in a more typical term, approximately 80 percent of votes are in support of the majority opinion, and only about 20 percent of cases are determined narrowly. The 5–4 cases that get national attention are in fact somewhat anomalous.

Take the highly consequential set of Supreme Court opinions from Monday. Perhaps the biggest was the opinion in the Trinity Lutheran case, one of the most hotly watched cases of the term, which concerned the constitutionality of a Missouri provision that prevented a church from obtaining state funds as part of a program to renovate playground surfaces. The case quickly acquired a partisan dimension: Liberals claimed that a ruling would “obliterate the divide between church and state,” and the ACLU filed a brief in favor of the state of Missouri. But the ultimate decision was 7–2, with Kagan and Kennedy joining the four reliable conservatives in the majority opinion and Breyer concurring. The Court decided as well on Monday to lift the injunction on Trump’s travel ban for everyone who lacked a “bona fide relationship” with an American person or entity. The travel ban, of course, is one of Trump’s central policies and has arguably been the most contentious issue of his first six months as president. But the decision to lift most of the injunction was unanimous, although three conservatives justices — Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — would have reinstated the entire ban.

Then there are all the cases we don’t hear about — cases that are often highly technical or esoteric but can still be very consequential. To take just a few examples from the Court’s most recent term: Salman v. United States, which found unanimously that a certain type of stock tip counted as insider trading; Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, which found unanimously that a New York law forbidding businesses to phrase their credit-card fees in a certain way violated the First Amendment; Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple, which unanimously settled a highly contentious patent case involving smartphones. These cases demonstrate the breadth and detail of knowledge employed by the justices, who must be able to operate in fields as diverse as First Amendment jurisprudence, criminal statutes, and patent law. That so many of these cases, involving such technical issues, are decided unanimously is a testament to the ways in which highly qualified thinkers can form a consensus on difficult matters of law.

These cases may involve less high-profile issues than, say, gay marriage and gun control, but that does not mean they are unimportant. The ability of the Supreme Court to deliver consistent guidelines on the entire scope of American law — from how a specific statute must be interpreted to complicated questions over jurisdiction to the rules governing class-action certification to the limits of sovereign immunity — undergirds our legal system. Appointing partisan justices without regard for legal qualifications would be like hiring Jackie Chan as a police officer — sure, he’s very useful the 1 percent of the time when martial skills are of paramount importance, but is he really adept at the less exciting day-to-day work that makes up most of the profession?

To be sure, 5–4 decisions do exist, and there is no shortage of opinions, even critically important opinions, that make a lot of political sense but very legal sense. Justices, even on the Supreme Court, are imperfect and too often are motivated by ideological principles rather than by a commitment to the principles of jurisprudence. But it’s wrong to see the entirety of the Court in this light: For every 5–4 decision that polarizes American society, there are dozens of unanimous and near-unanimous decisions that clarify important legal questions and provide guidance to the lower courts, not to mention the cases like Trinity Lutheran where an unexpected alignment of justices reminds us that abstract principles can still best partisan considerations. The Supreme Court may not be perfect, but it is hardly the devil we so often make it out to be.