Some day maybe we can smile about this, but right now only one person is.
“Some day we’ll look back on all of this, and it will all seem funny.” One of the many wise lyrics of Bruce Springsteen that comes to mind whenever all hell breaks loose and life is scary and we don’t know where all of this is headed. Come out, tonight, Rosalita. Yes, this is terrifying but someday we’ll laugh about all this.
So the Bromance between our President and Vladimir Putin continues to confound, cause stress and uncertainty, and generate multiple investigations that will dominate this Presidency for the foreseeable future. Five or ten years from now, maybe we’ll be in a position to laugh about all of this. Let’s hope so.
This morning conservative columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times in an article entitled “The Manchurian Candidate?” asks us to not jump to conclusions about the Bromance. He argues that perhaps all of what we are seeing is just inept bumbling of an arrogant and inexperienced group of unprepared businesspeople taking over the reins of government. http://nyti.ms/2rb6cdm
From the film “The Manchurian Candidate”
As this Presidency consistently keeps me from doing my other work, I had to send in a comment to the article, which reads as follows:
“I agree that there is room for less sinister explanations that the worst-of-all-possible scenarios (which should not be ruled out). But one thing is absolutely clear in all of this: Putin and the Russians brilliantly recognized in Trump and his hustling, inexperienced campaign aides an opportunity to undermine the presumed future U.S. President (HRC, anti-Putin hawk) and to weaken and cause uncertainty in the NATO alliance.
Whether or not there was active collusion on the part of the Trump campaign, there undoubtedly was passive acquiescence in Russia’s attacks on the HRC campaign — Trump even encouraged it on live television. Wherever the investigations lead us, it is clear that the real winner in all of this is Putin. He has successfully — through Trump — undermined the NATO alliance, one of his key obsessions, as this gives him more freedom in the Eastern European sphere. And he has in the U.S. President a man who will not criticize Russia’s actions no matter how brazen or bizarre or even murderous.
We are in a bad spot. Putin is delighted. I hope we find our way out of this mess. It remains very unlikely that this White House will be at all helpful in that regard.”
The funny thing about time is that looking forward one can see so many different outcomes, and looking backward there is such clarity in how we got where we are. But careful thinkers can see those inflection points, those moments when so many things might have turned out differently. What if that fog on the East River had not held up the British Navy and allowed Washington’s troops to escape at the Battle of Brooklyn? The “father of our country” would surely have been hanged and gone down in history as a traitor, and independence from Britain would have come decades later, allowing the North American continent to be divided up differently. In other words, no U.S. No fog that morning, no country as we know it.
What if Lincoln had not been assassinated? What if that guy posted at his door at Ford’s Theatre had stayed on the job? Would the whole violent cycle of Impeachment, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the White Backlash have been avoided, sparing us a century of racial strife? Small things that made huge differences in world events…
So we can’t know where all this is headed and small things may turn out to be world-turning. And yes, Rosalita, maybe someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.
But right now only one man is smiling. And that man is Vladimir Putin.
“Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Reflections on our tribal tendencies.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, delivered in March of 1861 as the United States was disintegrating into civil war, asked Americans to see themselves as one people who could — and should — abide each other’s differences and keep the experiment of self-government alive. The alternative, he argued, was that the right of secession, once established, would have no theoretical end, as minority political groups could forever keep disbanding from the Confederacy or the Union until only anarchy or despotism remained. Can’t we, he asked, pause a bit to recognize that our common bonds are greater and more important than our disagreements?
Immeasurable suffering resulted from our inability to respond affirmatively to that call.
So it is today that we still struggle to rise above tribal tendencies. The conversation continues and the question posed by Lincoln remains: can we choose to see each other as friends rather than enemies? Can we, in the age of fake news and alternative facts, summon somehow our “better angels,” be our better selves?
* * *
Lincoln, like Shakespeare, had deep insight into human character, long before modern brain research and psychological studies would confirm his insights. Having suffered from depression throughout his adult life, he had thought more deeply about life’s ultimate questions than most politicians before or since. In the phrase “better angels of our nature,” he was speaking with the understanding of one who had been close to suicide but would ultimately overcome his illness and rededicate his life to purposes larger than himself. His phrase contemplated that there is, as retired biologist E.O.Wilson has detailed, a fundamental duality in humanity, and that we are called upon, individually and collectively, to grapple with choices over how to live.
As Wilson describes wonderfully in The Social Conquest of Earth, humans possess extraordinary capacities of cooperation aimed at higher community or tribal success, but also unrivaled capacity for aggression, domination, even cruelty. This combination of character traits, hard-wired into our DNA, is what has made humans the super-species that has conquered the Earth, and also the super-species that is now capable of destroying our own biosphere and/or each other. As an example, it took extraordinary levels of coordination, collaboration, and teamwork to design and create a nuclear weapon, and it took a an extraordinary capacity for cruelty to use it — twice no less — on large human population centers. The tribalism reflected in warfare is what made that unprecedented killing palatable. Saving tens of thousands of Our side’s lives was worth the cost of hundreds of thousands of Theirs…
Having gone from near extinction at the height of the Ice Age only 60,000 years ago, humans have been so successful that the formula for our success (adaptability, cooperation, aggression) may ultimately, and ironically, cause our undoing.
When riots broke out in L.A. following the acquittal of the police officers accusing in the roadside beating of Rodney King, King went on television to urge calm and famously asked: “Can’t we all get along?” It was a more profound question than perhaps he realized. The jury is still out. As our number is now more than seven billion, getting along is both more imperative and more difficult. Whether we can get along may depend on whether or not we choose to be our better angels.
Rodney King
In the book Moral Tribes, psychologist Jeffrey Greene describes the conundrum well. The evolution of moral codes of conduct requires that humans occasionally favor Us ahead of Me (cooperation, collaboration). We hold up as virtuous that kind of selflessness. That same moral structure, however, can easily be translated into putting Us ahead of Them (tribalism, aggression, competition). We celebrate those actors as well: brave soldiers in battle, great athletes, the victors in capitalism’s many competitions, and so forth.
Interestingly, though, we humans define Us and Them differently from each other, depending on context and on our levels of moral and intellectual growth. So we not only have a tendency to be wary of others and other groups, but also a tendency to make these distinctions in non-uniform ways. We define groups and communities (Us and Them) differently depending on our circumstances and experiences across difference.
When we were small bands of hunter gatherer communities, undoubtedly the Us was the band that traveled, mated, and child-reared together, and the Them was the occasional group encountered along the way. Land was plentiful and population minimal, so conflicts were easier to sidestep.
With the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, however, things got much more complicated. With population increases came cities, property, specialization, monogamy, and formal religions. And of course, politics and wars. The tribal tendencies that had made successful collaborative hunter gatherers now worked to cause humans to put up fences, to defend turf, restrict sexual practices, and to form political alliances.
Today, some might define US as the nuclear family, and the rest of the world as Them, a skeptical and somewhat paranoid way of living. Some define the Us in terms of race or religion, with other races or religions being the Them, a formula for large conflicts (think Jim Crow, systemic racism, walls at borders and Muslim bans). Some business people, like Mitt Romney, separate groups into the “makers” and the “takers,” with clear preference for the former and disdain for the latter. And our current President invokes the language of white nationalism, with the demonization of the Other.
Some define the group in far broader terms, for example, that all Americans are one and must recognize each others’ bonds, the view Lincoln urged in 1861 and was later echoed by Barack Obama. One can, with training, even come to accept all of humanity as Us, even all of life as Us, a higher level of consciousness still, albeit one that not many of us achieve. Those who do achieve it — MLK, Ghandi, Jesus, for example — were controversial precisely because they confronted us with our inability to think more openly towards each other. MLK spoke of agape love, the love of humanity that transcends everything, even the fact that the people you embrace are trying to kill you. Few of us reach that state of agape love, however much we wish we could.
Ghandi
So what Lincoln asked of us — to see ourselves as friends — was not and is not easy. It is the same path, in a sense, that MLK, Ghandi, and Jesus asked us to walk. Find that better self. Recognize the humanity in others outside your comfort zone, your tribe. It is no accident that the higher love they envisioned was so threatening to our lower level tribal consciousness that they all, every one of them, met the same violent end. To challenge tribalism is to risk an early death.
* * *
While it is not easy or popular to reject tribal tendencies, to choose our better angels, it may be that our survival depends on it.
Returning to E.O. Wilson, his most recent book Half Earth argues that the human race can save the biosphere that we have subjugated and polluted if we dedicate ourselves to preserving half the Earth’s surface to biological preservation. This of course would require a level of national and international cooperation never before seen. (You thought sticking with the Paris climate agreement was tricky?) Humanity may be smart and adaptive enough to learn (if slowly) that it doesn’t have a choice. We either preserve our planet or we die. How could we fail to act to preserve it when that choice is made in those terms?
Easy. Just stick with the Us vs. Them tendencies long enough and we won’t be able to get where we need to be in time. History has many examples of cultures and communities failing to heed the warning signs, as Jared Diamond documents in Collapse.
Consider this: We are told that more than one billion people live between 0-5 feet above sea level. What happens if and when those people are displaced by rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms, a day that will surely come? If we see refugees as fellow members of our community in need, we shelter them and bring them in. If we see them as threats to our tribe, we exclude them and let them fend for themselves. Will our better or lesser angels guide our choices?
Similarly, count me among those who have concluded that political parties in the United States, as currently structured, may be causing more tribal harm than good at this point. Every day we are treated to examples of how party loyalty prevails over what is best for the country. In what ways is this good for us, the people? Hypocrisy seems to be the only predictable outcome of our political deliberations these days (with a special prize for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, whose accommodation of the unacceptable speaks volumes). If there were no such thing as political parties, or if we had so many political parties that collaborative alliances were necessary, would our outcomes not be better? If our representatives were just to vote based on what’s best for the American public, as best they could discern, what a relief that would be!
How to get there? It starts, of course, with ourselves. Somehow, despite the diatribes of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk urging us in other directions, we have to open our hearts to the rest of the world, even those who reject us and our way of thinking. The First Amendment protects the rights of the lunatic fringe to promote its agendas, but the counter-narratives must grow stronger. Perhaps it starts with all of us turning off the television “news” in recognition that the “news” channels have largely failed the public by morphing into entertainment and ratings businesses.
But there is also, in my humble opinion, a more basic ingredient that is required. We need a more informed citizenry. We cannot accept others as ourselves if we can’t recognize truth from falsehood. We cannot be at our best if we can’t recognize when the peddlers of division are manipulating our understandings of each other. This elevation of Know Nothingism, from the Willie Horton ads, to false portrayals of immigrants, to Sean Hannity’s false conspiracy theories, to the President’s routine departure from the truth all share one common theme: distortion of reality.
We are told that They are coming over our walls and into Our homes, and that We must protect ourselves. We are told that there is carnage in our streets and that we should be afraid. We have renamed law enforcement agencies “Homeland” Security, a throwback to Nazi Germany’s tribal invocation of the “Motherland.” These distortions surround us. They are effective politically but they are toxic to our souls. What if we were better — smarter — at recognizing B.S.? We teach our children at schools what sources are reliable and unreliable for research papers. Couldn’t those same skills be used for discernment in our national conversations? Can we shrug off the rants of the delusional?
The downside of Free Speech
We could open our eyes wider to see if these distorting narratives are actually true. We could educate ourselves to recognize better when we are being manipulated. We could recognize, for example, that even in the mundane detail of the proposed federal budget, there are proposed choices, reflecting what we think of each other and who among us we value. We could try to change the narrative to one that recognizes that at some very fundamental level, we really are all in this together and that we thrive or perish as one.
We are told that certain billionaires are building themselves underground bunkers and safe houses in New Zealand and the American West, where, if all hell breaks loose, they can live in comfort and safety. “We take care of our own” seems to be the message, “our own” defined stingily.
There is a smarter way, maybe the only way. We could choose life — life together. Life where our differences are simply part of the fabric of our bonds rather than a reason to separate. Life where we rise or fall together.
“The rule of law is under siege. … We are officially in banana republic territory.”
Tuesday evening, May 9th, 2017. Normally, I try to let the news cycle calm down a bit before commenting, but it seems that not much is normal anymore.
Just a few hours ago, the President fired FBI Director James Comey. He has the legal authority to do so, although the independence of the Bureau is so fiercely defended that this has happened only once before in history. Previous Presidents often feared the FBI Director and didn’t dare fire him. But Comey made himself vulnerable by grotesque self-inflicted wounds, making the President’s firing seem almost explainable at first glance.
Former FBI Director James Comey
There is, however, so much more going on than is visible at a first glance. Here are my initial observations as a former federal prosecutor and a former colleague of Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General at the center of this story:
Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein
Rosenstein’s letter is carefully crafted, and obviously was not started in the last 24 hours. This is a matter that must have been under consideration for at least several days if not longer.
The points raised in Rosenstein’s letter are meritorious. Comey violated longstanding Department of Justice policy on multiple occasions, documented well in the letter, and about which I’ve written often before. In so doing, he did great damage to the country by unnecessarily causing chaos in a national election — at several different junctures. His sins were both professional and political. The public commenting on evidence in a closed investigation is an absolute no-no in law enforcement, particularly when the subject is a Presidential candidate during a campaign. Similarly, the October 28th, 2016 letter, which many believe tipped the scales in the final weeks, was a shocking departure from well understood law enforcement protocols. Sanctimonious to the end, Comey’s explanations never held up to people who know this area.
Note, however, that the very reasons that Rosenstein cited against Comey were reasons that Candidate Trump loved Comey: he was beating up on Hilary Clinton and keeping a dead story alive. Strange indeed that the President now says I must let Comey go because that very same conduct is unprofessional. What does he know now about these matters that he did not know three month ago? There’s obviously more to the story.
What he knows now is, surprise, right from Comey’s own loose lips: that the FBI has an active counter-espionage investigation into the question of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian hacking operation. It can fairly be presumed that Paul Manafort, Carter Paige, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn are “targets” of the investigation, and that the President is a “subject” of the investigation.
Decapitation of the investigation into the administration’s connections, if any, to Russian meddling in the election is a seriously disruptive act. It will be difficult to get a new FBI Director appointed in the current political climate, and legitimate questions will be asked about what happens to the investigation and to the evidence when the lead investigator is summarily fired?
Attorney General Sessions was supposed to have recused himself with respect to the Russia investigation, but we today learned that he was involved in the decision to fire Comey. Does the highest law enforcement officer in the country not understand the concept of recusal? In normal times, this would be grounds for his removal from office.
The President could allay many concerns if he were able to appoint a well-respected, non-partisan FBI Director in Comey’s place. That, in theory, might assuage people’s concerns that this firing was not another Nixonian massacre, like the abrupt firing of Sally Yates.
The next in line at the FBI, Andre Macabe, is already compromised by his inappropriate whisperings at the White House about this very investigation. So leaving the post empty and having Macabe run things is an option that will not satisfy skeptics.
Calls are already starting to come in for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor. Rosenstein promised in his confirmation hearing that he would give that issue fair consideration. But will he be the next one fired if he does so?
Remember that the FBI and the Department of Justice are not independent agencies. The FBI is part of DOJ, and answers to DOJ (a point Comey seemed routinely to forget). The appointment of a special prosecutor, therefore, does not necessarily cure the problem of the FBI’s decapitation. Prosecutors, whether independent or not, need committed investigators to do their work.
Will the FBI be allowed to do a full and independent investigation of the facts? We know that the two Congressional committees are incapable of doing so. A Jeff Sessions-led DOJ also inspires no confidence. The truth-seeking process at this point relies entirely on the ability of the FBI to do its job thoroughly and without interference. We simply do not know at this point whether the Bureau will be allowed to do its job.
Neither do we know yet whether anyone at the current Department of Justice is capable of maintaining the necessary sense of impartiality to bring this matter to a satisfactory close.
It is too early to pass final judgment on what we’ve just witnessed. Certainly Comey gave the President a lot of cover by his mishandling of an important investigation (that the President benefited from greatly at the time). Comey’s bizarre behavior left him with no allies, so he was vulnerable. That does not mean, though, that the President’s actions are not suspicious.
The optics on this could not be worse for the President. He personally signed the order firing the man who knows the most about the investigation into his administration — on a matter far more serious than the public has fully understood. Nothing in the firing order or Rosenstein’s carefully crafted letter answers the question why the President waited three months to take this action. One would be naive to think it unrelated to the Russia story which hounds this Presidency.
The Administration wants the story to go away, but it cannot go away. The Russian attack was no less “dastardly” (to use FDR’s word) than if performed with jets and tanks. A foreign power successfully compromised our national election, helping defeat the candidate it most wanted to lose and helping elect the man it knew it had hooks into.
Because there is no smoke and no blood, most Americans fail to understand that what Putin pulled off was on the scale of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. It was a dastardly, successful, attack on this country and on our sovereignty. Putin is thoroughly enjoying the low-budget chaos he has wrought in the West.
Vladimir Putin
Try as some may to wish away the magnitude of the Russian attack, the facts will come out one way or another. The President, if he has nothing to hide, should welcome a full and thorough investigation by professional investigators and lawyers with experience in law enforcement. We did a bi-partisan fact-finding process after 9/11, didn’t we?
If, on the other hand, he continues to belittle the need for the investigation or if he fails to appoint someone of impeccable credentials and trustworthiness, the public will rightly believe that today’s firing was an effort to kill an investigation — just as serious as Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox.
These are not normal times. An Acting Attorney General, widely respected, was fired for refusing to enforce a travel ban of dubious constitutionality. The top United States Attorney, Preet Bharara in Manhattan, was summarily dismissed with no replacement named. An Attorney General recused himself but then took action in a matter closely related to the matter about which he was supposed to know nothing. And today, the director of the FBI, the person who arguably knows the most about the evidence against the targets of the investigation, was fired with no notice by a subject of the investigation. The rule of law is under siege.
It’s been only three months. We are officially in banana republic territory. If you care about democracy, here or anywhere, you should be very concerned.
Postscript: May 10th. This morning’s press reports indicate that the President’s motivation was in fact frustration over the fact that the Russia investigation is dominating the news, as well as Comey’s public disavowal of the claim that President Obama tapped Candidate Trump’s phones. The purported reasons have already been debunked.
Roger Stone, a close advisor to the President and a target of the investigation, apparently has been urging the President to make this move, and the Rosenstein/Sessions correspondence was, as it appears, the formal explanation (a/k/a the pretext).
The President doesn’t understand the First Amendment (and a few other things). He’s going to have to do some learning the hard way and deal with his new circumstances.
One of the dumber statements the President has made — several times now — is his promise to “open up the libel laws” because of all the unfair coverage he thinks he’s getting from the media. By making it easier to sue newspapers and television stations for libel or defamation, the thinking goes, the President could sue them when he feels the coverage is false or slanted. This is, after all, a tried and true tactic he employed over the years in his business life. Not happy with the story? Get your Pit Bull Roy Cohn to issue a snarky demand letter: retract the story or I’ll sue you…
Hypersensitive to criticism (a symptom consistent with narcissism), the President cannot abide any source of information other than Fox News, which at this point might as well be called State TV. He rails against the New York Times and calls CNN “fake news,” with no apparent irony about the fact that his campaign benefited tremendously from CNN’s endless coverage of his rallies, its promotion of false equivalencies between HRC’s mistakes and his, and the impact of the real fake news online that demonized his opponent beyond all connection with reality.
Accustomed to manipulating the New York tabloids to maximize his visibility (Marla Maples: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!”), he’s in a more serious game now, one where consequences attach to his words far more than before. The scrutiny is far greater, and the outing of his mis-statements, falsehoods, and exaggeration is more immediate. To a 70-year old man accustomed to not being questioned, seeing such negative coverage no doubt enrages him, as many internal White House staffers have confirmed.
Leaving aside for now the point that he does not have the unilateral power to make such a change of the libel laws himself, the statement that he will “open the libel laws” is fundamentally wrong in every conceivable way. First, existing libel and defamation laws protect ordinary civilians (not “public figures”) from injurious things that other people or entities say or publish about them. If the false statement causes actual injury, the plaintiff can receive damages. If the statements were intentionally false, in some instances the plaintiff can recover even punitive damages. So libel and defamation laws are alive and well, and don’t need “opening up.”
What the President means by “opening up” is a return to the state of the law to its pre-1964 status, when public officials could try, through libel suits, to intimidate newspapers into silence with the threat of civil judgments. Sorry, Mr. President. It’s not going to happen. This is another promise from which you’re going to have to back down.
In 1964, the abuse of libel lawsuits by local government officials against the media made its way to the Supreme Court. The New York Times had run an ad paid for by private advocates in support of civil rights workers under threat in the South. A local Alabama sheriff (Sullivan), although not even named in the ad, brought a libel suit against the New York Times in Alabama state court, appealing to local prejudices against the out of town newspaper, claiming that the paper had libeled him by running the ad, which had been critical of local law enforcement generally but did not mention anyone by name. He brought the case in the local friendly jurisdiction and obtained a half a million dollar judgment against it, the equivalent of several million today. The Times appealed.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 (yes, they used to actually be unanimous on important matters back then) in New York Times v. Sullivan that libel and defamation suits are limited by the constitutional protection of free speech, specifically the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press. The Court held that the press is protected from attack by public figures unless “actual malice” can be shown. What this ringing endorsement of the freedom of the press means is that public figures like the President cannot sue newspapers for publishing criticisms unless there are malicious, intentional falsehoods. In other words, if you intentionally publish something false about a public figure, you can still be sued for that. But if you make an honest mistake, or if you state the truth or a critical opinion wounding the public figure’s ego or reputation, that is not enough to sustain a lawsuit and a monetary judgment.
This ruling makes clear intuitive sense, and makes one wonder how there could be any other outcome. Bravo Justice Brennan for recognizing the power of a 9-0 vote and marshalling the opinion through multiple drafts to get to unanimity. Anyone wanting to learn more about the Sullivan case is encouraged to read Anthony Lewis’ fascinating account: “Make No Law” (photographed above). Another short tribute to it, written on its 50th anniversary, can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-uninhibited-press-50-years-later.html.
If the President were more familiar with history, he would understand what bad company he is keeping by advocating for the ability to intimidate or silence the press. Pick any example you like from history: shutting down the press is the key first step that despots the world over take to consolidate power. Silencing the press, whether through violence or libel suits, is aimed at the same end: eliminating criticism of government officials and eliminating transparency. It is the first play in the playbook of tyrants. This was well understood by the authors of the First Amendment, who stated unambiguously that the government shall “make no law” abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, or of assembly.
Of course Southern segregationists had wounded egos when their tactics of violence were exposed publicly. But without that exposure, the Civil Rights Movement would never have generated the international moral outrage that brought about positive change. Had the Supreme Court ruled the other way in Sullivan, libel laws could have been used indefinitely to intimidate the press with lawsuits — which is just what the President means when he talks of “opening [them] up.” Bring back the good old days when critics could be silenced and authorities could just do what they wanted.
He fails to understand that there really never were any such good old days. The First Amendment, of course, dates back to the founding of the country and was specifically included to protect the public from the kinds of despotic restraints on speech imposed by the Crown. And it received its first serious challenge from none other than John Adams, our second President, only a few years after the birth of the country.
Adams, brilliant but prickly, had his ego wounded by his political opponents more often than he could tolerate. The source of this antagonism was Thomas Jefferson, his former friend and then rival, who hired third parties to publish scurrilous material (much of it false) against the President. Adams pushed through the now-infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which among other things gave the President the power to silence and jail his critics. Sound familiar?
The Sedition Act prohibited criticism of the government, and was clearly unconstitutional under the First Amendment. It was set up to expire at the end of Adams term of office in 1800 (a dead giveaway that the Federalists did not want it to boomerang on them if they lost the next election). It was used to prosecute and jail publishers of pro-Jefferson newspapers. When Adams left office, the law was allowed to expire. History records the Sedition Act in particular as Adams’ worst and least forgivable mistake. The law has stayed in the dustbin since 1800, only to be mentioned by historians as a bad idea that should never have been tried in a country calling itself a democracy.
What comes with the turf of running for President and being President is the obvious reality that you are going to engender criticism, no matter how careful or solicitous of others’ opinions you are. There has never been a President in history who has not been criticized. Hopefully there never will be, because that means democracy is dead. Taking criticism from wherever it comes is just part of the job, and reflects the fact that the President works for the people and not the other way around. “Consent of the governed” were not idle words in the Declaration of Independence. The people, even we here, have a voice in these matters. There is no longer a divine right of kings.
Ignorance, it turns out, is not always bliss. For this President, his illiteracy in the meaning of the First Amendment and many other things governmental proves profoundly bothersome to him, because he can no longer simply require that everyone do his bidding, as in his private company. Ignorant of history and ignorant of what the First Amendment holds, he rants and wonders why it’s not possible to simply order that things be done his way without criticism.
Well Mr. President, that’s not who we are and not how our country is set up. This is not a marketing or branding exercise, where puffery is allowed and pushed to maximum effect. (The Trump Tower boasts 68 floors but in fact has only 58, but hey who’s counting?) In the nuclear age, facts matter more than ever. Objective truth matters. Having a free press unfettered by threats of lawsuits day in and day out is indispensable to a functioning democracy. The world is full of examples of what it looks like where the press is not free, places where there is nowhere to go for access to real information. No one would make that choice.
No, there’s no need to change the libel laws. New York Times v. Sullivan is “settled law” from a 53 year old unanimous precedent and is not going to be undermined even by this more conservative Supreme Court.
The President is just going to have to deal with it.
Even We Here 