Flake doing what he does best. Matt McClain for The Washington Post
Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
It hasn't been easy recently to make an attack against President Trump that is over-the-top enough to stand out from the run-of-the-mill hysteria, but outgoing Republican Sen. Jeff Flake managed it. In a speech hitting Trump for his broadsides against the press, Flake excoriated the president for using the phrase "enemy of the people." Per the Arizona senator: "It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies."
The association of Trump, whose offense is being crude and thoughtless while occupying an office he won in a raucously free election, with one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century is so wildly irresponsible it is its own corruption of our discourse.
Trump isn't a despot. Far from being an autocrat, he's a weak president susceptible to the views of the last person he's talked to and so deferential to Congress that he spent all of last year pining for a signing ceremony for literally anything lawmakers could send him on health care or taxes.
At its worst, the Trump White House isn't sinister; it's farcical. It's not Recep Tayyip Erdogan carefully and deliberately creating a one-party state; it's Trump getting miscued by a TV show into a tweet undermining his administration's own position on the reauthorization of a surveillance program.
The Trump alarmists thought that a brittle democratic culture and set of institutions were about to encounter a man representing a dire, determined threat to their integrity; instead, a robust democratic culture and set of institutions encountered the guy sitting down at the end of the bar yelling at the TV.
David Frum of The Atlantic warned at the beginning of the year of Trump cowing the media. Instead, Trump faces the most hostile press at least since Richard Nixon. So comprehensively do Trump outrages dominate the news cycle that it's difficult for a sex scandal involving a porn star to break through. If you're a late-night host who doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time on Trump, your ratings lag. Michael Wolff has sold more than a million copies of a loosely sourced book whose power is the salaciousness of its gossip and its confirmation of everything people who hate Trump already believe.
Rather than stretching his powers, Trump has reined in the executive overreach of the Obama years, which was brazen and unconstitutional, although undertaken with much greater politeness. Obama proudly thought he could rewrite immigration law on his own and make recess appointments when Congress wasn't in recess.
There's no doubt Trump violates norms that we should want to preserve. The president shouldn't slam reporters and news organizations by name, call for people in the private sector to be fired, criticize companies or urge his adversaries to be jailed, among other routine provocations.
Trump does not, to say the least, have a deep understanding of our constitutional system, and if he had his druthers, his Justice Department probably would be completely loyal to him personally. But is he serious enough about this impulse to execute a plan to carry it out and bear the political consequences, even from Republicans? Of course not. So, he stews about his DOJ, and even attacks it as the "deep state," but Attorney General Jeff Sessions remains in place and special counsel Robert Mueller continues his work.
If Trump's eruptions don't speak well of him, they shouldn't be confused with unconstitutional acts. The first time Trump said he wanted to tighten up libel laws, it was alarming; the second time he said it, it was notable; by about the fifth time he said it — with obviously no intention to follow through — it was clearly an irritable mental tic.
Some of the alarm about Trump is over fairly normal expressions of democratic politics. It's a natural dynamic that special-prosecutor investigations become partisan war zones. Anyone appalled by the attacks of Trump allies on Mueller should acquaint themselves with what James Carville and Paul Begala said about Kenneth Starr.
The irony is that those who believe Trump is a budding despot are themselves violating important norms. It's hard to imagine Trump doing anything as remotely undemocratic as the Electoral College coup some heretofore serious people on the left advocated after his 2016 victory.
Josef Stalin wouldn't tolerate any of this agitation. Donald Trump rages against it, stirs it and enjoys it, one news cycle at a time.