On the ‘no-rules’ frontier

It was spring when Bud Cummins provided a glimpse of the coming Trump Revolution. I was trying to figure out Trump’s appeal. Cummins, the former U.S. attorney and narrowly failed Republican congressional candidate, was Trump’s campaign chairman in Arkansas. So I engaged him over coffee.

Here is a summary of what Cummins told me: Late in his congressional race against Democrat Vic Snyder in 1996, he had called Snyder a liberal and then said that liberalism can lead to socialism, which can lead to communism. I and others in the media reacted in howls of outrage that he was essentially trying to smear his opponent, an ethically pristine former Marine, as an incremental pinko. Cummins nearly fell over himself apologizing for his faux pas.

But what Trump was demonstrating, Cummins said, was that the media had long set the supposed rules of proper political conduct, but never with any enforcement mechanism. The media could thus be foiled by a politician ignoring what amounted not to a rule, but a bluff. Release income-tax returns? Who says?

Cummins said that, by Trump’s example, he should have shrugged through that controversy in 1996 because it wasn’t a real issue of concern to voters—and, you know, it was true. Liberalism is on a path to socialism which could become communism. That’s mere political and economic theory, just as conservatism can lead to fascism. He wasn’t calling Snyder a commie any more than he was calling himself a fascist.

Misspeaking? Well, OK, let the columnist go around, county to county, speaking exhaustedly off the cuff for months and see if he ever says anything less than perfect.

Now we witness the revolution. Trump says and tweets things that the media declare by their time-honored implied rules to be outrageous and inappropriate and dangerous and offensive—or at least unnervingly irregular—and Trump says so what, and his supporters don’t care.

We now enter a new frontier, different from what we just left, unknown as to what’s ahead.

The immediate effects are twofold.

One effect is that seemingly candid political independence now carries a premium while the old safe-speak rules as set by the pundit class are less important than, say, what folks in Indiana think about saving a thousand or so jobs from going to Mexico.

But offering special tax inducements to one company threatening to leave, and not offering them to others, is unfair and flawed policy, the pundits say. Oh, shut up, ye discredited lords of yesteryear, reply Carrier employees. Finally, someone stood up for us and didn’t kowtow to you, they say.

The other effect is that we now live in a post-fact society in which the established authorities on what is true—a legendary paper of record like the New York Times or trained professional diplomats as employed by the State Department—no longer are ceded authority or credibility or even trusted to be well-intentioned.

Without working through the State Department, Trump tweeted that he had chatted on the phone with the leader of Taiwan. The State Department was said by the media to be aghast because there were delicate and explosive issues affecting the United States regarding Taiwan and China.

I went on Twitter to assail this preposterous president-elect for his utter effrontery and irresponsibility. People replied that the State Department was corrupt and that what they want is a president who’ll stand up for them unencumbered by the weary way things have always been done.

The immediate concerns—no, alarms—also are two-fold.

One is that a free civil society and a healthy democratic republic require commonly accepted facts, a generally accepted truth, and institutions that are trusted. National policy cannot be driven effectively or responsibly, or safely, by a loose cannon of a near-autocrat backed by people who believe only the conspiracies they read about on favored and remote websites and in purely partisan publications.

The other is that some of the rules set unenforcably by the media or the so-called establishment were sound, even sacred. A presidential candidate ought to let us see the personal financial information that can be gleaned from recent income-tax returns. A president-elect of the United States ought at least to seek expert diplomatic counsel before he gets on the phone to shoot the breeze with a head of state. A president-elect who gets on Twitter to support a direct affront to constitutional law—that’s news, and the media ought to report it, and people ought to read it, even if they decide to dismiss it as a distraction.

The one sacred rule Trump has said he will obey is divesting himself of international business interests to free the American presidency of even the appearance of personal financial conflicts of interest. That’s probably because a constitutional phrase banning a president’s accepting “emoluments” from other countries is conceivably enforceable as the supreme law of the land, even by impeachment.

If it was merely a media rule, Trump and his daughter could do all the international business they wanted from the Oval Office.

That’s absent personal ethics and discretion, the best rule of all, though apparently not available in the present case at the present time.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.