In 5 stress texts, democracy checks Trump’s recklessness
A future trivia question and historical footnote, the spectacular flameout of Anthony Scaramucci qualifies as the most entertaining episode yet of the ongoing reality show that is the Trump presidency. But even as the cocksure sycophant’s gobsmacking spectacle stole the show, something of real importance took place a bit lower on the radar.
At five separate junctures, the sinews of our democracy held against the careening recklessness of this presidency: this case, the military offered resistance to mere whimsy. Next time, it could be resistance to unlawfulness.
Trump’s relentless public humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clearly intended to get him to resign. He didn’t, in part because of increasing support from Congress. Sessions’ former colleagues came out strongly in his defense and some openly criticized the president’s shabby treatment of his first and most fervent senatorial supporter. Indeed, Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, warned Trump not to fire Sessions because he wouldn’t get another attorney general — the committee’s entire 2017 schedule was set and there would be no hearings to approve a new AG. That was a finger to the eye of the president. Every once in a while, the Senate seems to remember that it is a coequal branch. Nonetheless, the stunning Senate rejection of repeal was also a pointed rejection of Trump’s hectoring. And a show of senatorial disdain for Trump craving a personal legislative “win” on an issue about whose policy choices he knew nothing and cared less.
In a rebuke not as earthshaking but still telling, the chief executive of the Boy Scouts found it necessary to apologize for the president’s speech to their quadrennial jamboree. It was a wildly inappropriate confection, at once whining, self-referential, partisan and political.
How do you blow a speech to Boy Scouts? No merit badge for the big guy.
In an address to law enforcement, Trump gave a wink and a nod to cops roughing up suspects. Several police chiefs subsequently reprimanded Trump for encouraging police brutality — a mild form, perhaps, but brutality still.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was all a joke. Nonsense. It was an ugly sentiment, expressed coyly enough to be waved away as humor but with the thuggish undertone of a man who, heckled at a campaign rally, once said approvingly that in the old days “guys like that” would “be carried out on a stretcher.”
Whatever your substantive position on the various issues involved above, we should all be grateful that from the generals to the Scouts, from the senators to the cops, the institutions of both political and civil society are holding up well.
Trump is a systemic stress test. The results are good, thus far.