Enemy of the People?

The president of the United States is using Twitter as a racist flamethrower against his fellow citizens.

    If you’ve never been to Baltimore, you may not want to trust Donald Trump’s Yelp review. Instead, maybe consider the range of artists who’ve each depicted distinct Baltimores — Barry Levinson, John Waters, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anne Tyler, David Simon, among others — that are somehow all authentic and indelible. Baltimore is a microcosm of the United States in all its gritty, diverse, yearning, tough, tense and imperfect glory.

    My experience of Baltimore in the days when I lived in Washington and worked there regularly as a stand-up comic was that it was a good place to get better because Baltimore crowds — Democratic, Republican, black, brown, white, gay, straight, working- and middle-class, Johns Hopkins professors and Chesapeake Bay crabbers — had no time for either fools or phonies, so connecting with them meant that much more (especially as a gringa whose knowledge of baseball was abysmal). There were no cheap laughs to be had in Baltimore and that made a good night even better. It takes a certain level of malice and a tactical need for provocation to gratuitously insult Baltimore, especially when you’re in a position to help solve the problems it does have.

     Elijah Cummings is a widely respected, beloved congressman currently serving his 13th term representing Maryland’s 7th district, which includes just over half of Baltimore City and most of the majority-Black precincts of Baltimore County. It takes a racist with a tactical need for provocation to gratuitously insult Elijah Cummings. (Because I’d rather not use this space to amplify the hate and ignorance of a source seemingly bent on amplifying hate and ignorance, I won’t quote what Trump said about Cummings and Baltimore, which you’ve probably already seen and, if not, can Google).

     Trump’s tirade against both Baltimore and Cummings (entering day three at this writing) isn’t just the usual daily debasement of his office, his country and democracy the world has come to expect peppered with some base-baiting; it’s punitive, deterrent censorship. Cummings, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, made a passionate intervention during a hearing July 18 in support of the humanity of children being kept in inhumane conditions at the Mexican border, and has been fearless in his descriptions of Trump. Using the presidential Twitter account as a racist flamethrower against entirely rational, proportional outbursts against injustice isn’t just about retaliating against Cummings. It’s a way of discouraging anyone else who might feel sufficiently outraged to do the same on this or any other development nobody ever thought they’d witness.

     For a sense of the insidious way in which normalization can creep, it’s worth noting that before Trump’s inauguration, there were questions about whether his Twitter habit would represent a national security risk. While that question hasn’t been asked much lately, his use of Twitter to spread lies, disparage his fellow citizens, frighten immigrants, insult women, move markets, weaponize trade policy and destabilize America and the world speaks for itself.

     The most important political division in Western democracies today is not partisan or ideological but between those contributing to the degradation of democracy using the intractable kamikaze tactics of Trump, Boris Johnson and others and those fighting to preserve it. Maybe Twitter should take a side, stop saying Trump isn't violating its hate speech rules — which he clearly is — and enforce them. 

     Or perhaps, given his love of amazing deals and in the spirit of this lunatic moment, the Democrats could give him what he seems to desperately want and impeach him — on the condition that he stop tweeting. As Trump himself might say, a win-win for everyone.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, a writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.