He uses vulgarity to signal whose side he’s on. It worked for Hugo Chávez, and Cleon, too.
President Trump’s crude performance last week at an annual gathering of conservatives — he physically embraced the American flag, called the Mueller probe “bullshit” and referred to Rep. Adam Schiff as “shifty” — was an affront to the decorum we expect from presidents, and plenty of critics pointed this out. Trump was “not merely undignified as a leader; he is committed to stripping away the dignitypossessed by others,” Michael Gerson wrote in The Washington Post. One Twitter commenter described the speech as “an undignified mess of slop,” and another labeled Trump “the most undignified President in history.”
But this was the same Trump who as a presidential candidate referred to the size of his manhood during a Republican debate. He said about protesters at his campaign events, “In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough.” He asserted that “Islam hates us” and that Mexicans are “rapists.” Not only did he get away with those offenses, but they somehow made him stronger. And he’s gone even further as president. After each episode, Trump’s critics have been as scandalized as they have been ineffective, just as they were after the speech at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference. During the campaign, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called Trump “the most vulgar personto ever aspire to the presidency,” and see how far that got Rubio.
In fact, demagogues like Trump are almost always undignified. That is a feature, not a bug, of their politics. When Hillary Clinton infamously described his supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” Trump swiftly converted the comment into a badge of honor. It turned out that he wanted his followers to trumpet themselves as “Les Deplorables” — because that was already his argument. While their critics think demagogues hurt themselves politically by violating the standards of polite society, they’re doing the opposite: They’re doubling down on an unorthodox but potent politics.
View the complete March 8 article by MIchael Signer on The Washington Post website here.