President Trump kicked off his state visit to the United Kingdom on Tuesday by tweeting that the mayor of London “is a stone cold loser.” This, because Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted that ‘racist groups across the world have been normalised and mainstreamed because of Donald Trump.”
As they are wont to do, Trump’s apologists insisted that he was just hitting back, ignoring that Khan was merely referring to the racist rhetoric and policies that are features of Trump’s presidency. But surely, no matter the criticism, it’s beneath the dignity of the office for any president of the United States to respond with juvenile insults. Yet such insults are also features of Trump’s presidency. But they are not presidential.
Remarkably, his apologists are claiming that the normal behavior he displayed with Queen Elizabeth II shows that Trump can be presidential. They think he deserves praise for not insulting her (too), talking with his mouth full, or otherwise embarrassing himself/us (notwithstanding the ill-fitting tuxedo that made his hands look smaller than usual).
Sadly, this is the kind of reductio ad absurdum arguments they are normalizing and mainstreaming to explain/defend so much of what this president says and does.
The point is that Trump’s norm-busting behavior knows no bounds. Only this explains him using the cemetery for America’s war dead in Normandy as a backdrop to hurl trademark insults at his political foes back home.
Speaking on the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France during World War II, Trump honored the dead and paid tribute to survivors, a solemn duty of American presidents.
The address near Omaha Beach won praise from supporters and critics alike. …
Beforehand, however, with the crosses of the Normandy cemetery in the background, Trump in his Fox News interview described former special counsel Robert Mueller as a ‘fool’ and called Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a ‘disaster.
(USA Today, June 7, 2019)
It just so happened that Pelosi was also in France for this D-Day commemoration. But she demonstrated how abnormal Trump’s insults were by refusing to speak of him in kind. She cited not just the solemnity of the occasion but its overseas location to boot for doing so.
But the normalization of his norm-busting behavior is becoming such that condemning it is becoming abnormal. Indeed, this cognitive dissonance is now so perverse that everyone praises Trump effusively whenever he says or does what any president should. This is almost as pathetic as a hostage thanking his captor effusively whenever he shows basic human consideration – like providing a glass of water.
Even worse, praise for one thing seems to give Trump license to say or do another 100 things no president should.
And so it goes.
Instead of praising Trump, however, commentators should point out how he is continually lowering the bar for presidential behavior. Frankly, we should bemoan the irony that it has become abnormal for him to say or do what is normal.
Above all, though, we should use the Mueller Report, as well as the criminal prosecution of so many of this president’s men, to point out how Trump is continually crossing the line between busting norms and committing crimes. And we should warn what dire consequences portend if he is not politically impeached and/or criminally prosecuted for his unprecedented high crimes and misdemeanors.
Related commentaries:
D-Day…
Mueller Report…