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.”
________________
[i] Jacques Steinberg, “Back to ‘Talking Smack’ with Rosie, Donald and Barbara,” New York Times, January 11, 2007.
If it doesn’t seem quite fair to be an earwitness to the unraveling of one man’s perfectly ordered world, the compensation of hearing the “Johnson Treatment” first hand is justification enough.
From a communications perspective President Lyndon Johnson was a fascinating figure. Most political communication scholars mention his speeches, particularly the disastrous ones defending the Vietnam War and the successful ones on civil rights. Indeed, his address to a joint session of Congress arguing for voter rights legislation in March of 1965, is one of the towering achievements of the presidency. He virtually shamed his southern colleagues into relinquishing their stranglehold on voter access, especially in the south. Johnson’s rhetoric could be lumbering and labored. And he could be terribly insensitive. But in that speech the angels sang, and the nation finally got a Voting Rights Act that would enfranchise millions.
Johnson the communicator is also remembered for another reason that can be summed up in three words: the Johnson Treatment. To put it simply, the former Senate Minority Leader was an incredibly persuasive man in one-to-one meetings with his colleagues. To go through the experience was to be subjected to a nonstop barrage of arguments, pleadings, commands, threats and intimidation until the target could take no more. Some of what he did was genuine persuasion. Some was simply hammer-lock coercion building off Johnson’s power in the Senate, and later, as the accidental president.
We know this from first-hand accounts of those who faced the Johnson gauntlet. But we can also hear what the treatment sounded like.
It wasn’t just Richard Nixon who recorded many of his White House conversations. Johnson taped many of his own phone calls. And so we have a record of endless day and late night conversations, sometimes with Johnson just thinking out loud (especially with his Senate mentor, Richard Russell). But among the calls are a number where Johnson is demanding compliance from a cabinet member, a senator, or some other victim in the far-flung federal establishment. We can hear the insistent gale force pressure of his words overwhelming a surprised minion, some of whom were not happy to be strong-armed.
“Sarge was reluctant to accept the post; LBJ refused to take “no” for an answer.”
Sargent Shriver
Such was the case with a fateful 1964 call to Sargent Shriver, who was then living his dream job as head of the Peace Corps. Shriver loved the agency, with its mission of humanitarian work performed by a growing cadre of the young and idealistic Americans. But Johnson had bigger plans for the Marylander and former Kennedy administration official. He wanted Shriver to head up the ambitious but unbelievably complicated effort of the administration to wage a full-scale “War on Poverty.” If the idea itself was inspiring, Shriver surely knew that it would be a hornet’s nest of overlapping and competing federal programs. It promised all the organizational headaches that were mostly avoided in the much smaller Peace Corps program.
Here’s the call, which starts with a pause while White House operators bring the two together:
If it doesn’t seem quite fair to be an earwitness to the unraveling of one man’s perfectly ordered world, the compensation of hearing the Johnson treatment first hand is justification enough. The call is reminder that persuasion is not always polite, fair, or pretty. But fascinating?
Yes.
By the way, by most accounts, Shriver brought credit and success to the mammoth undertaking of the administration’s War on Poverty.
