Presidents should be above common cussing
Donald Trump is a threat to decorum, says Andrew Cohen.
In the Age of Trump, American democracy is under siege. The president’s attack on the judiciary, the media and the electoral process are among the existential threats to the United States.
David Frum makes this case in his important new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. His call is clear and urgent, like a fire-bell in the night. He joins a legion of honest liberals and conservatives who worry about the erosion of institutions through greed, malfeasance, apathy, ignorance and ineptitude.
But while Frum and other minutemen raise that alarm, there is another danger to civilized society, less grave but still corrosive. It is not the threat to democracy. It is the threat to decorum.
When Donald Trump called Haiti and its poor cousins “shithole countries,” he used language that by tradition and convention presidents do not use. He crossed into a new frontier of vulgarity and coarseness, giving new meaning to the oath of office.
Within moments, “shithole” was on the lips of broadcasters, politicians and editors. It was in news stories and in headlines. This wasn’t the word of some stevedore or longshoreman, for whom profanity is the lingua franca. It was the president.
No, Trump didn’t swear in public. He was not giving a speech in the Rose Garden or an interview in the Oval Office; he was conferring with legislators in a meeting he presumed private.
Nor is Trump the first president to use profanity. Surely, most have. Some, like Lyndon Johnson, freely used “n----r.” The difference was that no one knew.
Curiously, the firestorm around Trump is less about his profanity, per se, than his scorn for the peoples of non-white countries of the Caribbean and Africa. For many, it wasn’t that Trump used “shithole,” as if he were dissing a bad resort; it was that he was smearing sovereign nations.
Trump’s ... vulgarity alone is enough to condemn him.
Which is too bad, in a way, because Trump’s language was offensive in itself. His vulgarity alone is enough to condemn him. Predictably, Trump now denies it.
So do his enablers, including senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton, who at first couldn’t recall the word the president used and then, upon reflection, decided to challenge it. Speaker Paul Ryan folded his hands into his cheap suit and, from the depths of indignation, called Trump’s epithet “unhelpful.”
Trump reportedly says his crudeness will play well with his base — the “I’m- just-saying-what-everyone-is-thinking” defence. Don’t we all know that Haiti isn’t Club Med?
Trump’s problem is he has no filter. He also has the vocabulary of an eighth-grader, relying on worn superlatives and tired cliches. Confident he can say whatever he thinks, he makes stream-of-consciousness a virtue.
Trump’s looseness of language illustrates his failure as president: he doesn’t know when to shut up. With the tools of new media at his fingertips and old media at his door, he gives voice to every whim, caprice, notion and impulse rattling around in his head, like a deranged parrot in a gilded cage.
His predecessors had more latitude. When John F. Kennedy audaciously allowed a documentary film crew into the White House in 1963 to record him handling a domestic crisis, observers were appalled. “The White House is not Macy’s window!” they cried.
In hours and hours of candid raw footage of Kennedy, his brother, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and their assistants, what is striking is their restraint. The cameras are running, sure, but no one swears, let alone remonstrates or rants, despite enormous pressure. It just isn’t done.
Today, profanity italicizes popular culture. Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain salts his language on CNN, as does comedian Bill Maher on HBO. It’s cool to be crude. It’s also boring, and really unimaginative.
Naively, we thought more of the president of the United States.
Now, with a shrug, he’s America’s Cusser-in-Chief.