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This week, President Trump’s decision to use the South Lawn of the White House as the venue for the fourth night of the Republican National Convention got a whole slew of political reporters suddenly interested in government ethics. You see, this convention scheme was a flagrant violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan political activity on government property or by employees of the federal government who do not serve in explicitly political jobs. Hatch Act violations are pretty commonplace and rarely receive a lot of attention, but it’s not every day that television cameras get pointed at a Hatch Act violation during prime time, so it was deemed worthy of discussion.
Sorry to say, however, the coverage was too little, too late for a president who’s trashed ethical norms since his first day in office—and the way the media played this infringement was often so insultingly dumb that you almost wished nobody had bothered to cover it. On Thursday, as the final night of the convention got underway, reporters tweeted their astonishment at what was unfolding, as if this was finally the moment they came face to face with Donald Trump and his corrupt ways. The RNC’s capture of the South Lawn for these brazen political purposes was, to ABC News’s Jon Karl, “a sight I’d never before imagined.” To NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, it was “something I thought I’d never see.” It was, of course, planned many weeks in advance! |
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The framing was intriguing: To hear these seasoned reporters tell it, the sights on the South Lawn weren’t wrong or unusual, but rather unexpected and hard to imagine. By this time next month, the president may have had many more Hatch Act–violating events at the White House for the purposes of his campaign. At that point, it will no longer be unexpected or hard to imagine—and the wrongness and illegality will be even more difficult to make a stink about. These corruptions are on their way to being normalized.
At least Karl and Mitchell deemed the matter worthy to share with the public. The most galling reaction to this sudden uptick of interest in Hatch Act violations came from the clapped-out Washington elite’s favorite tip sheet, Politico Playbook, whose authors wrote on Wednesday that while Trump’s plans violated these ethical guidelines and it was, they supposed, “incumbent on the media to point that out,” what people really needed was a healthy dose of BELTWAY STRAIGHT TALK: “Do you think a single person outside the Beltway gives a hoot about the president politicking from the White House or using the federal government to his political advantage? Do you think any persuadable voter even notices?”
Leaving aside the fact that Playbook never includes material that anyone from outside the Beltway gives a hoot about, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Hatch Act seeks to do: prevent the trappings and symbols of the federal government from being used to influence persuadable voters by subtly granting the incumbent a grander look and feel. As former congressional reporter Meredith Shiner exasperatedly tweeted, “This is an emerging media narrative—that normal people won’t care about the law being broken—when that’s the point of breaking it!”
If “persuadable voters” don’t notice the law being broken, it’s the job of reporters to point it out and make sure they notice. Smugly smirking with your elite Beltway readers about what the rubes that live in the hinterlands care about is a different sort of choice that a different (by which I mean bad) sort of reporter makes.
In the days before Trump’s inauguration, when ethics officials were sounding alarms about how easy it would be for Trump to violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, Christina Wilkie and I wrote a story for the Huffington Post that attempted to explain why these concerns were of pressing interest to the public. A key thing to remember is that the Emoluments Clause, like the Hatch Act, can’t enforce itself: There aren’t ethics RoboCops that fly into action when a violation occurs. These are norms that we count on our elected officials not to disrupt. It worked relatively well until Trump came along with his immunity to opprobrium and shame.
Now that these norms are being disrupted, journalists are not supposed to dismiss them as mere trifles. As Wilkie and I pointed out in our story, such norms can be granted a measure of protection via “public pressure from public exposure.” That is to say, the relentless journalistic pursuit of norm-breaking violations can create the condition where the demand for accountability can’t be ignored. It may sound far-fetched, but there are real-world examples in which the intensity of media scrutiny created these conditions. Consider, if you will, what might happen if the media rabidly covered the sketchy operational security of a presidential candidate’s private email server, publishing hundreds upon hundreds of stories about it. It’s possible to make a big deal out of anything; these means can be put to the ends of serving the public interest.
So what’s to be done with reporters who don’t think the gradual erosion of American democracy is a big deal? We could replace them, for a start. In the meantime, if a journalist behaves as if the potential slide into authoritarianism isn’t something you should worry about, then maybe that’s because they know it won’t materially affect them.
—Jason Linkins, deputy editor |
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| TNR’s political team covered all four nights of the RNC this week; you can look back at what we had to say about the Democratic National Convention as well. If Trump’s Fyre Festival of fear and loathing left you with the impression that Republicans were a party of foaming sociopaths, Bruce Bartlett is here to tell you that it didn’t use to be this way. Tim Noah further offers that Trump’s messaging about how Joe Biden wants to destroy the suburbs belies a lot of ignorance about those enclaves. As for Republican claims about Democratic Party rule of America’s cities, Osita Nwanevu warns that these have some merit and that Democrats should confront it head on. Matt Ford sizes up Trump’s week in the spotlight as a sign that he’s ready to declare war on the entire notion of civil service. Libby Watson caught wind of Trump’s allies touting the president’s contributions to solving the rural health crisis and says, hey, not so fast. Alexander Zaitchik uses the example of the race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine to suggest ways in which we can break pharmaceutical monopolies. Jasper Craven pens a dispatch about the ways the American Legion has become more exclusively white during the Trump era. John Wilmes writes about how the NBA recently emerged as a sought-after target for conservative culture-war attacks, even though the league’s liberal politics tend to be anodyne rather than radical. (A few hours after we published it, NBA players went on a wildcat strike, so I guess we get results.) Finally, Chris Lehmann spelunked into the scandals of the House of Falwell and emerged to remind us that while all the sex stuff is good for a laugh, Jerry Falwell Jr. made out pretty good, having lined his pockets with filthy lucre. |
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