By David French
Thursday, October 12, 2017
The vast majority of commentary about Donald Trump’s tweets
centers on Trump: What do they say about his state of mind? Do they signal a
change in American policy? Will he follow through on his threats? Is he a
master media manipulator or just angry? Is he playing nine-dimensional chess or
is he simply undisciplined and impulsive?
I want to focus on another question entirely: What are
Trump’s tweets doing to the political character of his Republican supporters?
I focus on his tweets because they’re the primary way he
communicates directly to America.
Yes, Trump has some set-piece speeches, and yes he still
holds the occasional rally, but he stubbornly clings to his smartphone as a
direct line to voters. His tweets reach beyond the relatively small slice of
Americans who read political Twitter. They’re reproduced in hundreds of news
articles, they dominate cable news, and their substance spreads across America
in countless debates and arguments. In short, they define our national
political conversation.
They are also often absurd and unhinged.
Take yesterday, for example, when he launched yet another
series of tweets against the “fake news” media, culminating with a direct
threat:
Network news has become so
partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if
appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!
— Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2017
It shouldn’t take a lawyer to note that any action to
challenge “licenses” on this basis would be unconstitutional. It’s Civics 101:
The First Amendment protects press freedom, and that protection is easily broad
enough to encompass any effort to silence journalists simply because the
president believes their work is “partisan, distorted and fake.”
Yet, incredibly, across the country rank-and-file
Republicans react to such messages not by rebuking Trump but by trying to find
a way to rationalize or justify them. Many go even further, joining Trump in
his attacks regardless of their merit. These folks are degrading their
political character to defend Trump, and the damage they do to their own
credibility and their party’s in the process will endure long after he has
departed from the political scene.
Trump is stoking a particularly destructive form of rage
— and his followers don’t just allow themselves to be stoked, they attack
Trump’s targets with glee. Contrary to the stereotype of journalists who live
in the Beltway and spend their nights at those allegedly omnipresent “cocktail
parties,” I live in rural Tennessee, deep in the heart of Trump country. My
travels mainly take me to other parts of Trump country, where I engage with
Trump voters all the time. If I live in a bubble, it’s the Trump bubble. I know
it intimately.
And I have never in my adult life seen such anger. There
is a near-universal hatred of the media. There is a near-universal hatred of
the so-called “elite.” If a person finds out that I didn’t support Trump, I’ll
often watch their face transform into a mask of rage. Partisans are so primed
to fight — and they so clearly define whom they’re fighting against — that they
often don’t care whom or what they’re fighting for. It’s as if millions of Christians have forgotten a basic
biblical admonition: “Be angry and do not sin.” Don’t like the media? Shut it
down. Don’t like kneeling football players? Make them stand. Tired of American
weakness overseas? Cheer incoherent and reckless tweets as evidence of
“strength.”
The result is a festival of blatant and grotesque
hypocrisy. Republicans are right now in the process of demanding that every
Democrat and every progressive celebrity of any consequence denounce Harvey
Weinstein. Yet when Donald Trump faced serial accusations of sexual assault
after being caught on tape bragging
that he liked to grope women, many of these same members of the Republican base
were furious at those conservatives who expressed alarm. When serial
sexual-harassment allegations claimed the careers of Bill O’Reilly and Roger
Ailes, many of these same members of the Republican base accused the media of
“taking scalps.”
On a vast scale, members of the Republican base are
defending behavior from Trump that would shock and appall them if it came from
a Democratic president. There is of course always a measure of hypocrisy in
politics — partisanship can at least partially blind us all. But the scale here
beggars belief. Republicans never would tolerate a Democratic president’s
firing an FBI director who was investigating the president’s close aides and
then misleading the American people about the reason for that firing. They
would never tolerate a Democratic president’s specifically calling for
unconstitutional reprisals against his political enemies. They would look at
similar chaos and confusion in a Democratic White House and fear a catastrophe.
Even worse, Republicans are — to borrow my friend Greg
Lukianoff’s excellent phrase — “unlearning liberty.” For example, for many
years conservatives focused on ways to protect free speech, an essential
liberty under attack from intolerant campus leftists and a larger progressive
establishment that labeled dissent as “phobic” or bigoted. Now? Republicans
defend Trump’s demands for terminations and economic boycotts against football
players who engage in speech he doesn’t like. “Well, it’s not technically
illegal,” they say, knowing full well the chilling effect such language will
have and knowing full well that they would be howling in anger if President
Obama had ever expressed a similar desire to squelch, say, Tim Tebow’s prayers.
They know full well that they condemn progressive corporations who use their
economic power to squelch dissent. Republicans even defend direct calls for
unconstitutional reprisals against members of the press.
“He fights,” they say. And they relish the liberal tears.
It’s been said countless times because it’s true:
Politics and law are downstream from culture. For the sake of short-term
political victories — for the sake of protecting a single American president —
Republicans have shown themselves willing to help change the culture to one
that declares, with one voice (Left and Right), “Free speech for me, but not
for thee.” Unless the GOP base changes course — there’s still time, by the way
— and demands that its president
embody the constitutional values that are supposed to define the party, the
degradation of our culture and of long-standing respect for the Constitution
will outlive even the memory of any given political debate.
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