Presidential pettiness treads close to authoritarianism

Earlier this week, I published a piece at The Conversation about how the current occupant of the White House likes to sweat the small stuff, especially if it has a good culture war angle. It’s no secret that Trump likes to wade into petty arguments with private citizens and entities, and that he likes to fan the flames of cultural conflict. But it’s especially striking if you look at this in contrast with past presidents, who have basically sought to hide behind federalism and delegation and everything that they can to avoid adding more issues to their agenda, and to sidestep cultural conflict. This had been changing gradually in the twenty-first century, or course, but as usual Trump represents, somehow, a difference in both degree and kind. This piece went to press before ABC gave into administration pressure and suspended Jimmy Kimmel from his late night show, and, more to the point, before Trump’s posts on social media threatening other late night hosts, talking about Kimmel’s ratings and generally being the most powerful person in the world, using that power against the Constitutionally-protected media.

Obviously, lots of people have written about the legal dimensions of the first amendment, the larger threat that this poses to anyone who criticizes the administration in public, etc. But from the perspective of presidency scholarship, there’s another angle. Our norms and expectations for how presidents will communicate – including ones that seem relatively unimportant, like staying out of pop culture debates and discussions – are actually bound up with the ways in which we limit the power and influence of the office.

It's not a perfect comparison, but I keep thinking about when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the TV show Murphy Brown in the early 1990s for a storyline in which the title character decides to raise a child on her own. The White House wasn’t too pleased that Quayle brought this up, and it was (perhaps because the ticket lost later that year) seen as a kind of political liability. The demand that presidents (and those in their inner circle) remain somewhat above the fray didn’t seem terribly important then; just another incident of Vice President Quayle being a combination of lightweight and culture warrior. Obama also flew too close a few times on this front, and I’ve written in the past about how his comment calling Kanye West a “jackass,” while trivial, signaled an important shift in presidential communication. But neither of these incidents involved actual government action, and all the pop culture figures involved continued to do what they were doing.

Through the involvement of the FCC, the Trump administration has gone beyond using their influence and have employed the power of the government to punish speech it doesn’t like. But we can see in this incident how the formal and informal limits work together. Or don’t. Anyway, I hope you’ll read the piece.