Trump has not lost his ability to offend or insult. He has lost his ability to surprise. Since 2017, commentators have reacted to Trump’s travesties by praising him for not doing worse. Trump is graded on a curve like no president in history. If he refrained from erupting in schoolyard epithets, or abusing nations as “shithole countries,” or inviting onlookers to punch a senator in the face? Then he was growing into the job. Trump indeed did not do any of those things last night, so he is collecting puppy-training accolades today. What a good boy!
The German artist Max Liebermann remarked after a brownshirt parade under his window in 1933: “I could not possibly eat as much as I would like to throw up.” Through the gruesome evening, a look suggesting such a thought flashed again and again across Nancy Pelosi’s face. When it was all over, including the insults to her, she allowed herself a human moment of protest against the spectacle into which she had been involuntarily enrolled by more than a century of custom.
It is now Pelosi, not Trump, who is the target of criticism. The world expects the speaker to know how to behave. If she deviated from expectations, she did so as a self-aware adult who can be held accountable for her actions—unlike the damaged child who occupies the White House.
The criticism of Pelosi perpetuates a dangerous dilemma in American life. Trump will trash norms of decency and decorum, either because he chooses to or because he cannot help it. But he and his supporters invoke those same norms when they need help or protection. When Trump degrades State of the Union night into a WWE WrestleMania, it’s: USA, USA. When Pelosi crinkles her eyes in disapproval: Hey, that’s the successor to Washington and Lincoln! When Trump hurls abusive nicknames? Well, that’s just what he does. When Pelosi omits a customary compliment? How dare she.
It’s not only Trump personally, but his whole administration. In the summer of 2018, then–Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service at a Washington-area restaurant. There was much tut-tutting then: How have we allowed our political differences to escalate to such a point? Wasn’t there a time when a dinner out could be a refuge from politics, when opponents could be civil to one another? And the next day, she returned to her usual daily work of lying and defaming, hurt and offended that anybody would doubt that she remained a good person underneath it all.
In only the past 10 days, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could summon a reporter, scream and curse at her, spread a false story about her afterward, and then solemnly avow American leadership in the defense of the free press in a public interview. Trump and his retainers want to behave like banana republicans while inheriting the prestige of Reagan Republicans. It’s a deeply crooked deal.
