Tag Archives: Violated presidential norms

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Is Retribution an Actual Organizing Principle?

He says he is doing this for others. But his vindictive acts seem to spring from a persecution complex that turns the idea of a unifying president on its head.

Donald Trump has noted many times that his administration is organized to seek retribution for words or actions used against him and others who share his views. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he told supporters in March 2023. He warned the nation that this would be his guiding “principle” for governing, and he has kept that promise. In a stunning break with the norms of past presidents, Trump makes it a point almost every day to use his office for payback to group and individuals he sees as oppositional. Hence he has taken away security protection for former officials who have criticized him, including Anthony Fauci and John  Bolton. And ostensibly “woke” safety net and federal aid programs that have offended him have been unfunded. Stripping people of their employment or protection is cruel and easy; doing the hard work of governing is mostly beyond him. Given this logic, only the completely synced vice president could imagine that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan were  “placeholders” rather than true “men of action.”

Retribution is a behavioral outlier that turns the long settled idea of a unifying president on its head. Instead of looking for transcendent themes, Trump cites injustices—often against him personally—most of his time is spent on proclamations of  denial and repudiation. This attitude has its own lexicon;  reckoning, redress, reprisal, retaliation, revenge, and vengeance are among the many terms at the bottom of a dark pit of dystopian motives. Normally these play out in criminal narratives, such as The Sopranos or the Godfather films. Most Americans would not want to be ruled by these impulses. But Trump has a sociopathic streak. Hiding his ire behind a reality show smile, he seems to think that the enactment of flamboyant public reprisals gives him stature.

In truth, there’s no normalizing these pitiful attacks. Consider the vast range of civil society institutions denigrated or defunded:

  • Universities
  • Federal and state courts
  • Political opponents
  • Former NATO allies
  • News organizations
  • Businesses
  • Trading partners
  • Election volunteers
  • Former presidents
  • Law firms
  • State leaders
  • Equal rights groups
  • Museums and libraries
  • the United Nations
  • Immigrants
  • Aid agencies
  • Funded medical and academic  research

NPR has tallied over 100 targets picked because of some slight against the President, or one of his questionable assertions. The New York Times has a more detailed catalogue. Most, he believes, are guilty of  what he sees as personal slights against him, some ginned up to be “treasonous” crimes.

Its an old trope of our species to feed off the familiar cycle of hate,  victimage, and punishment. Think of Puritan trials, male oppositional rituals in violent “sports,” or Shakespeare’s historical plays that display brooding quests for revenge. We have mostly tamed these impulses, giving the formal function of retribution to the criminal courts. Who else is interested in building a national movement around so aggressive and brutal an idea? As a collection of scholars writing in the journal Law and Human Behavior note, “Retributive justice essentially refers to the repair of justice through unilateral imposition of punishment,”   but courts can also take the different route of “restorative justice, meaning “the repair of justice through. . . a shared. . . bilateral process.”  Requiring a defendant to make good on an earlier promise to a plaintiff would fit the restorative model, which can be adapted to policy-making.  But seldom does Trump take this more coactive stance.

Who builds a national movement around so brutal an idea?

Retribution is easily paired with the idea of hate, the engine that powers the desire to give a wounding response. In turn, this adds a level of worry within targets fearful of the negative consequences that may result. Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski recently reported her own fear of the consequences for doing her legislative duties.  That is a terrible omen, and surely the reason we have a servile GOP.

It is apparent that Donald Trump has obviously banked a lot of the personal and professional slights that have eaten away at his judgment. The result is that we’ve ended up with endless executive actions against individuals and groups that have verge into the pathological.

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Rethinking Our Frames

Fortunately, the sad state of our national politics does not disallow the chance of cultivating other forms of affiliation.  We need to find frames that will keep us in awe of the miraculous efforts of others.

It is axiomatic that we view the world from a set of durable frames. Duty, imagination and comfort feed into our choices. But it is not uncommon that we find ourselves in a rut, governed by a continuing point of reference that no longer offers the experiences that sustain us. Everyone’s moments of bliss are different. I can only use the example of my experience. But the general question is universal: what frames of reference reward us?

For many years my professional frame of reference happened to include the exploration of political communication patterns in our national life. I taught the subject, wrote extensively about it, and responded with guest columnist jeremiads when our national discourse seemed to be withering. A representative part of this frame included three editions of a book, Political Communication in America, written with my colleague Robert Denton Jr. The first edition was in 1985: a panoramic look of topics as diverse at the presidency and congressional lobbying.

As the state of our national politics seemed to sour, I gradually changed my academic focus to escape into more rewarding and less explicitly political areas, mostly by returning to my earlier roots of modern rhetorical theory. One representative book representing this shift was a 2010 project subtitled The Rhetorical Personality. It freed me from what had become a near obsession with the study of our federal establishment. That culture has been spent by the small-minded politicking that has crept into the deliberative side of our politics. Too many people seeking what should have been deliberative roles have found more rewards in politics as performance. Still in the future, the seeds of this decay of would take root a thicket of corrupted rhetoric after 2016, culminating in the destruction of norms of the presidency that I never imagined would be at risk.

For me, a book looking at embedded personality traits of people destined to be in the public was a fresh start. It sought to be a collection of insights that my education was meant to encourage. I soon followed up with two more contributions exploring the nature of human rhetoric: one in the form of a book on the rhetorical and psychological processes of identification, and a second parallel study of how we assign motives to others in the face of little evidence.

That’s my story of a change of frames of reference for organizing my professional life. In retrospect, I could not have sustained my career of 47 years if I had stayed on my original path. Political communication had become a dispiriting subject. By 2016 I mourned the devolution of a viable Republican Party at the hands of millions who have abetted it. In very different ways those people are as disappointed with their perceptions of the nation’s direction as I was. For many reasons the political culture of this great country forces its citizens to witness horrifying attitudes and events. We may feel it these effects all the more because, as columnist David Brooks has noted, we are “overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.”

There’s also another related and distinctly personal thread here. A family member happens to work as a mental health therapist. So, in addition to all of our casual discussions, by happenstance the common reading material at our breakfast table often included the Psychotherapy Networker, a glossy but well edited monthly written for professionals engaged in private practices or associated with institutions. Over the years touching base this resource set my sights on the redeeming traits of a therapeutic frame of reference. Unlike the competitive and combative realms of national politics, those doing mental health counseling are far more interested in the softer impulses of collaboration, conciliation, and empathy. In this frame, verbal combat is not a useful process. No one is considered a lost cause, and everyone has a backstory that at least partly accounts for sometimes egregious thoughts and behaviors.

There Are Many Ways to Connect

We could include other frames that occupy the time and thinking of different individuals we may know. Some find it easier to get up in the morning because of football, or the frame of firm religious conviction, or the organizing principle of broadening boundaries through travel. My own preference is to escape into hours of listening and learning about music. For me—if not always the musicians who produce it—rigid ideological differences seem to dissolve into forms that renew us. There is real joy in this special form of “rhetoric” which is non-stipulative and, thanks to the conventional rules of the chromatic scale, largely and happily resolved.

Here’s my point. Everyone will use their own lens to bring their lives into focus. And while the nation is entering a very dark period, we need to protect our sense of place with interests that give us pleasure. To be sure, we can never abandon participation in the civil life of a nation. This requires us to hold on to connections to civil society groups, including the press, while engaging in other processes that are necessary in an open society. But this does not disallow chances for cultivating other forms of affiliation that will keep us in awe of the miraculous efforts of others.

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