IN AGE OF TRUMP, SHOW CIVILITY TO SANDERS ANYWAYS

We’ll give the owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., this grace: She certainly engendered a national discussion about civility in our overly acrimonious world.

We aren’t going to run down the motives that led the owner to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, to leave the establishment before her party could have dinner. But there’s a larger point we’d like to draw about the continuing coarsening of our civil discourse. In short, it’s not very civil.

At this moment, we are just coming off of a news cycle where Americans were treated to the facts of a very tough story about President Donald Trump’s policy of separating children from parents who attempt to illegally enter the country. Now filling the news are reports of parents who are unable to locate children who have been whisked off to faroff facilities.

Nor is this the first issue that has elicited a visceral reaction from Americans concerned about, on basic humanitarian grounds, how people are treated rhetorically or through policies promulgated by the chief executive. In fact, looking over the past 18 months of the Trump administration, it is easy to find comments that appear to castigate people of color, people from other countries, or just people who oppose the president.

From that escalator Trump used to descend onto the scene and launch his bid for the presidency to this month’s still-unfolding border tragedy, there are more examples than one can reasonably list in a short article that drew widespread condemnation. This doesn’t serve the president or the country well.

To us, this is an issue that stands apart from the president’s policies, many of which we support and others we’ll oppose vigorously. Rather it is an issue about public leadership. When the president of the United States uses words that assail the personal character of others or that cast large groups of people into a negative light, he is similarly giving license to others to engage in rhetorical roughness. He is making it more likely that others treat their fellow Americans with a level of incivility that’s unbecoming of a great nation.

We wish that Sanders had been granted the grace of a fine meal. And we wish others would find the grace within themselves to treat the rest of us with the civility all people deserve.

In a book of the same title, Peggy Noonan once called for instilling a “patriotic grace” in our civic culture. For the love of country, we hope others find that patriotic grace so that we can start having the civil discourse necessary to offer solutions to the problems we face.