US politics: No Time to Pretend The courts and the press are putting themselves at risk by treating Donald Trump like a normal president
The courts and the press are putting themselves at risk by treating Donald Trump like a normal president. By DAHLIA LITHWICK
It’s not easy to draw a straight line between oral arguments at the Supreme Court and the White House correspondents’ dinner, but I’m going to give it a try. It’s not just that both are highly selective, members-only gatherings. The two events are also closely linked by the fact that they rely on public showcasing of institutional norms for their continued survival. Taken together, they reflect the no-win conundrum faced by those who embrace norms at the expense of reality in an era in which institutions are all we have left to save us. It’s hardly radical to posit that in the year and a half since Donald Trump took office, the press and the courts have been the strongest checks against his campaign of distorting reality and attacking the credibility of fact-based institutions.
With the Republicans who control Congress unable and/or unwilling to raise their seat backs enough to do anything of substance, political journalists and judges have, in a deft one-two move, uncovered secrets and lies and halted the worst offenders and offenses in their tracks. But that binary model is too simplistic, and it elides the problem that both journalism and the law face when they rely on their own immutable norms to protect themselves. Over the weekend, we saw what happens when the norms of “civil discourse” among journalists collapsed in the face of Michelle Wolf’s comedic takedown. And at the Supreme Court, during last week’s oral arguments in the travel ban case, Trump v. Hawaii, we were transported to a bizarre world in which this president was discussed as if he were a normal head of state.
It’s not easy to draw a straight line between oral arguments at the Supreme Court and the White House correspondents’ dinner, but I’m going to give it a try. It’s not just that both are highly selective, members-only gatherings. The two events are also closely linked by the fact that they rely on public showcasing of institutional norms for their continued survival. Taken together, they reflect the no-win conundrum faced by those who embrace norms at the expense of reality in an era in which institutions are all we have left to save us. It’s hardly radical to posit that in the year and a half since Donald Trump took office, the press and the courts have been the strongest checks against his campaign of distorting reality and attacking the credibility of fact-based institutions.
With the Republicans who control Congress unable and/or unwilling to raise their seat backs enough to do anything of substance, political journalists and judges have, in a deft one-two move, uncovered secrets and lies and halted the worst offenders and offenses in their tracks. But that binary model is too simplistic, and it elides the problem that both journalism and the law face when they rely on their own immutable norms to protect themselves. Over the weekend, we saw what happens when the norms of “civil discourse” among journalists collapsed in the face of Michelle Wolf’s comedic takedown. And at the Supreme Court, during last week’s oral arguments in the travel ban case, Trump v. Hawaii, we were transported to a bizarre world in which this president was discussed as if he were a normal head of state.
Start first with the
fact that Trump has been assailing both the media and the courts since before
he took office, going after the press as “the
enemy of the American people” and trashing “so-called judges.” Consider
that both the press and the courts have struggled ever since with their
professional responsibilities: Do we pretend everything is unfolding just as we
would in a Mitt Romney administration, or do we set ourselves up as the
resistance, in a move that will discredit the institutions themselves? We’ve
muddled through that conundrum with varying degrees of success by toggling
between calling out that which is legitimately dangerous while also striving to
preserve the norms of dignity and civility and sanity that our institutions
depend upon... read more:
