Set your mind back to 2011. Things are not going well in Iraq. A bunch of Republican members of Congress post a video reciting the law: Members of the military should not obey illegal orders.
President Barack Obama takes to Twitter to say this about the members of Congress:
It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.
An hour later, Obama emphasized his point:
SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!
What would happen next?
There would of course be a Republican uproar in Congress. The uproar would be justified. A bunch of Democrats would probably join the chorus.
The main issue would be the appropriate remedy for the president acting this way: Congressional censure? Surely. Impeachment? Maybe. Is falsely accusing members of Congress of sedition, punishable by death, a high crime or misdemeanor? Is the accusation an implicit threat, inciting the presidents’ supporters to commit violence? Or maybe the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment because the president’s sanity, or at least capacity, is in question? Again, maybe.
In any event, Obama’s statement would ignite a firestorm. The presidency would be at risk.
Suppose in 2022 Joe Biden had been caught on camera saying to a female reporter who asked him a hard question: “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”
Would Republican operatives have said that Biden was being “frank and honest” and this was one of the many reasons people had elected Biden? Or would Republicans have been up in arms? “If the chief executive officer of any public company had been caught on tape doing this, he’d be fired before the end of the day!”
I can hear the Republicans now: “The old coot is senile! He’s lost his sense of propriety! An autopen must be signing legislation!”
I’m not sure Republicans would have tried to impeach Biden over this, but it would have been quite a scandal.
These two events — presidential allegations of sedition and the admonition “quiet, piggy” — of course occurred last week in Donald Trump’s administration. There was no public outcry.
Indeed, what’s remarkable is that those two events were probably not the most shocking things that Trump said or did last week. Trump praised the human rights record of Mohammed bin Salman — the man who the CIA concluded with high confidence had ordered the assassination of Jamil Khashoggi. Trump threatened war with Venezuela. Trump deployed the National Guard to yet another American city.
I often think that pundits turn up the volume too high, becoming hysterical about every one of Trump’s slight missteps. But then I think that, in normal times, people would have gone nuts over behavior as erratic as Trump’s was last week.
These, of course, are not normal times. In the age of Trump, none of Trump’s comments or deeds is a big deal. It’s just Trump being Trump.
But until something, or someone, restrains Trump, this will get worse before the term is out.
Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.
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