An ever-growing list of ad-hominem attacks from Donald Trump is one of the more discouraging features of our current public life.
Before Donald Trump became president he got into a public fight with comedian Rosie O’Donnell. The result was a series of ad hominem attacks noting that Rosie was “not smart,” “crude,” “disgusting,” “a slob,” and “an animal.”[i] We could not have known then what we know now. It wasn’t long before we would hear Trump go after all of his political opponents and many of his own party members using the same crude language. Just one of his political opponents, Marco Rubio, was described by Trump to national television audiences as a “loser,” “a lightweight,” “a puppet,””a choker,” “a little boy,” and so on. [ii] Add about 350 others who got the same treatment, and you begin to understand the tsunami of invective that has swamped our public rhetoric.
Ad hominem occurs when statements worded as halfway arguments are actually directed against persons rather than their ideas. The language is personal and negative, often in an attempt to deflect attention from the merits of an idea and toward supposed defects of an individual or a group. This formal reasoning fallacy is a clear ethical breach, which is why it is taught in virtually every argumentation course from middle school to university level in the United States. To the credit of our students, it almost never shows up in their work. If only we could say the same for this President.
In private, former President Richard Nixon uttered what a former aide called an “undeniably ugly” range of attacks on his opponents. Nixon was, notes Leonard Garment, “a champion hater,”[iii] a fact that has been revealed in releases of conversations Nixon taped in the Oval Office. Crude epithets were uttered about Supreme Court members, publishers, and his famous lists of White House enemies[iv] Of course Trump has taken the process further by publicly calling out critics and members of the press with epitaphs most Americans thought they would never hear from a chief executive. An ever-growing list of these attacks from Trump is one of the more discouraging features of our current public life, and testimony to the poverty of his rhetoric.Since the President is traditionally the first contact most children have with American politics, the fact of his endless verbal abuse must give parents pause.
The language-challenged New Yorker has seeded a wholesale decline in the quality of our public discourse.
Thanks in part to Trump, we are now awash in reactive and mean-spirited “commentary” from the web to newspapers to prime-time cable talk shows. The language-challenged New Yorker has seeded a wholesale decline in the quality of our public discourse. The rest of us are beginning to talk in screeds about the “pinhead,” “narcissist” or “jerk.” We naturally want to counterpunch to the blows inflicted on others by his words.
In many ways this kind of language is as old as politics, but there is now a crucial difference. Because web “comments” are frequently posted by Americans anonymously, respondents to articles and other content can now say anything they want in the vast spaces of the internet. There is no personal cost for being a rhetorical bully.
Ad hominem has thus been given an unfortunate new life as a refuge for individuals unwilling to expend the effort to argue the merits of ideas. A reliance on personal invective is sign of intellectual laziness and an indication of a person’s inability to find the higher ground of a common cause: a lethal defect in a President. Of Course we can’t blame all of this collapse of civil discourse on Trump. But he surely is “Exhibit A.”
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[i] Jacques Steinberg, “Back to ‘Talking Smack’ with Rosie, Donald and Barbara,” New York Times, January 11, 2007.
If older Americans are uneasy about the man who will occupy of the White House, it may be because the recent election has parallels to the dark aftermath of The Battle of Chicago.
Just a few days ago President Obama closed out his eight years with a heartfelt appeal to preserve our freedoms. It was delivered to Chicagoans just a few blocks south of Grant Park, marking yet another quadrennial transfer of power. As it was in 1960s, so it is now: the transition has left millions of Americans with a sense of unease about what comes next.
Though it can be risky to look for historical parallels, the coming transition offers the same stark questions of character that surfaced after The Battle of Chicago in Grant Park: a national trauma that contributed to the election of Richard Nixon.
That nadir was the summer in the election year of 1968. Americans were shaken by the impression that the superstructure of our nation-state was beginning to fall away. The stains of the assassination of President Kennedy five years earlier were still sealed into the fabric of the culture and only a preamble for what followed. Martin Luther King was gunned down in April while organizing a poor people’s campaign in Memphis. Two months later Robert Kennedy was fatally wounded while campaigning in Los Angeles. By August, and against an enveloping sense of doom, there was at least the modest hope of some sort of political redemption as Democrats gathered in the Windy City to stage-manage a presidential nomination. It was supposed to be a celebration of the orderly transfer of national leadership that would finally acknowledge increasing public opposition against the Vietnam War. The conflict had already taken almost 17,000 lives. The nation was not only at war with the North Vietnamese, it was increasingly apparent that it was at war with itself, especially younger Americans who could be conscripted into what many saw as a meaningless conflict. Inside the International Amphitheater near the stockyards the party trudged toward the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. He was to replace a mortally wounded Lyndon Johnson who had dithered his administration into a freefall trying to find an exit from its war policy. Johnson’s attempts at leadership had divided the Democratic Party so badly that it was in the process of incinerating itself.
That would become all too clear on the night of August 28, when hundreds of anti-war activists and many young Democrats were on hand to inadvertently seal the fate of the party. Their goal was to march in front of the Hilton and Blackstone hotels across the street from Grant Park and within earshot of the convention delegates. But they would witness the fury of what an official commission later described as a “police riot.” Some of the activists were troublemakers. Most simply wanted to register their frustration with the inertia that had overtaken the nation.
The city and the nation had seen police violence many times before. But this bloody battle in the park and surrounding streets settled into the national consciousness as a symptom of a deep and unbridgeable political rupture. It virtually guaranteed that the government would be handed over to the G.O.P. candidate, the secretive and suspicious Richard Nixon. Nixon was a living paradox who could barely conceal his instincts to vilify his supposed opponents–Jews and the press in particular–and ignore the formal limits of presidential power.
Both Nixon and Trump struggled to overcome the common impression that they were not only tortured personalities, but placeholders for someone better.
Fast forward to today and the epilogue for another chaotic election. President Obama’s farewell address in the same city brings us full circle. As steady and centered leader prepared to depart, an untested victor with another long enemies list and a Nixonian yearning for legitimacy prepared to take over.
Even in 1968 we knew that Nixon’s demons included an ongoing resentment toward the Kennedys, first because of his loss to JFK in 1960, and more generally because the Bostonians were effortlessly likeable. Trump labors under a more complex but similar burden of insecurity, on display in his nonstop insistence on his greatness, but also heightened by our awareness of the natural grace of his predecessor.
And so the victor feeds our collective discomfort. Even with the formal powers granted by the office, both Nixon and Trump struggled to overcome the common impression that they were not only tortured personalities, but placeholders for someone better.
