This President has become a de facto Minister of Hate, to our detriment.

Governments have a range of administrative leaders known variously as cabinet officials, secretaries or ministers. Who could forget the Monty Python sketch with John Clesse about the British government’s Minister of Crazy Walks? In the same vein I have a colleague who I sometimes teased about being the Minister of Slights when he pointed out in meetings that our academic department was not fully acknowledged by the college’s leaders. And he was usually right. In academia as in life someone needs to keeps track of these things.

But there is no humor in the behavior of this President, who has turned the formerly elevated rhetoric of the office upside down with vicious  remarks especially to women in our national media. There are important libraries that celebrate presidential eloquence. But a long tradition of positivity about the citizens of the nation been abandoned. Somali immigrants, many of whom are citizens, have been labeled “garbage.”  Members of Congress have been tagged for alleged “sedition” and even execution.  And most of America’s biggest cities have come in for abuse as “hell holes,” with some versions of this kind of misanthropy extended to nations with mostly non-white populations.

As we know, more recently two Hollywood notables paid with their lives at the hands of a mentally ill son and, unaccountably, were immediately subject to his appalling words. I have recounted the President’s perversion of presidential rhetoric in other posts. But the aftermath of the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner Trump were a new low in spewing vitriol. The same day this awful murder became known Trump offered the view on Truth Social that the murder of “a tortured and struggling” Rob Reiner was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. . . He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.” How could a President twist a family tragedy into this partisan and vile piece of braggadocio? This was said about one of the most generous and liked Hollywood veterans.  And who but a fool talks about himself in the third person?

This page is intended to celebrate rhetorical successes.  Instead, we have been given a President who has become our unwanted Minister of Hate. His non-stop blather sometimes sounds like unchecked rhetoric of drunk just tossed out of a bar. Living with this kind of official abuse for three more years will be a severe test for the republic.