(Bloomberg View) -- Why should anyone care what the president tweets, anyway? Especially if it isn't really relevant to policy?
When it comes to politics, words are a form of action. When the president bullies women as women -- and I think it's fair to say he's done that -- it has serious political consequences. It's not just that this kind of bullying is a form of assault, as would have been the case back when Donald Trump was merely a reality television star. It's that a government official demeaning citizens by group -- women, ethnic minorities, political minorities or any other group -- is a form of robbing them of their full citizenship. Any member of a group that's been attacked by its own government is going to find the public sphere less hospitable than he or she would have otherwise. The president won't be alone, either; others, inside and outside of government, will inevitably pile on. Others will just as inevitably tend, to some extent, to take their participation less seriously. Less equally. Especially for groups whose citizenship and ability to take political action has historically been tenuous -- and women certainly qualify -- that's a very big deal.
A healthy democracy depends on full citizenship for all. That's something the U.S. didn't begin to live up to until the mid-1960s, and it has struggled with that since then as well. Trump is actively undermining the progress that's been made.
At the same time, Trump's continued campaign to demonize the news media, a campaign in which he's only joining 50 years of Republicans in carrying out, also weakens democracy. Personally attacking individuals in the press may be (and should be) protected speech, even by the president, but it still weakens democracy by harming the freedom of the press.
It is certainly true that media norms place self-protection for the media high on the list of outrages that the "neutral" press allows itself to condemn, rather than just describe. So, yes, violations of civility that target the press are going to get a lot more media attention than those targeting other citizens or groups (or, for that matter, policy discussion). While that's in some sense unfortunate, it doesn't mean that the media is wrong. A free press may be a pain in the neck for a lot of people, and it certainly will make mistakes and, yes, be biased one way or another at times. But without it, no democracy.
It is very good to see a fair number of Republicans, writers and some politicians fighting back, but again: In some ways, Trump's media-bashing is the most Republican thing about him. If the party is going to recover from this and avoid further trouble, the voices currently in dissent will need to speak up even louder when it's politicians they basically like who are leading the exact same charge (albeit likely in a somewhat less crude fashion) in the future.
1. Julia Azari at Mischiefs of Faction with a very good piece on the president and Twitter in historical context.
2. James M. Curry and David Karol at the Monkey Cage on why congressional party leaders survive bad elections.
3. Rick Hasen on Trump and voter fraud.
4. Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt at the Upshot on Medicaid and health outcomes (hint: it helps).
5. Tim Fernholz on the National Space Council.
6. David Dayen on single-payer in California and liberals deceiving themselves.
7. Margaret Sullivan on CNN and getting a story wrong.
8. Jane Chong at Lawfare on emoluments.
9. Kate Brannen at Just Security on Trump's conflicts of interest.
10. Kevin Drum on the Republican campaign against the Obamacare individual mandate. He's correct as far as it goes, but at some point it might occur to some Republicans that a whole bunch of unhappy health insurance customers is a problem for the incumbents, not the out party. So perhaps deliberately creating a whole bunch of unhappy health insurance customers might be, well, complicated.
11. Kevin Kruse at Made by History on the Fourth of July and partisanship.
12. I love Alyssa Rosenberg's recommendations for viewing and reading on the Fourth. Not too late!
13. And McKay Coppins on anti-Trump conspiracy theorists. Absolutely important. There's nothing that makes liberals immune to the kind of nonsense that has done so much harm to the Republican Party; what's critical is keeping it out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Democrats in my view did a good job of this during the George W. Bush administration. Even while nutty and even nuttier rumors about Bush and Dick Cheney were being passed around by many rank-and-file Democrats, politicians and organizations generally avoided them. The Trump challenge is even more difficult for a variety of reasons, including that there's so much real lawlessness here -- see above! -- and quite a bit depends on Democrats fighting off the temptation to indulge in things they should be shunning.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net.
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.
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