The upending of basic decency and norms began long before Donald Trump.
“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings—unintentionally.”
The quip is attributed to Oscar Wilde, and the sentiment is capacious enough to include Donald Trump. For even the most ardent Never Trumper would concede that when this president offends, it’s intentional.
During the 2016 campaign, for example, Mr. Trump claimed a judge’s Mexican heritage meant he couldn’t be impartial. He belittled a Muslim mom and dad whose U.S. Army officer son had given his life in Iraq. And he declared John McCain was “not a war hero” because he had been a prisoner of war. The insults continued in the Oval Office, from regular jabs at “Crooked Hillary” to “low IQ” tweets variously directed at MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, actor Robert De Niro and Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.).
As America heads toward the November midterms, one fruit of Mr. Trump’s insults is a national lecture about the need to restore civility and norms to our politics. The latest campaign was launched Friday when Barack Obama, in what he conceded was his own departure from a long-established norm of “ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage,” scored the Republican Congress for its “phony” civility and savaged his successor as an existential threat to democracy.
Yet the civility offensive is not without contradiction. How is it that those who presume they posses the moral standing to preach on Mr. Trump’s incivility are so conspicuously blind to the equally glaring outrages of his critics?
Was it civil, for example, for Hillary Clinton to dismiss half of Trump voters as “deplorables” who were also “irredeemable”? Is it civil that showing up with a “Make America Great Again” cap can invite a beating?
Perhaps this explains why the civility conversation is mostly confined to those who already agree. In the past few months alone, after all, Americans have watched press secretary Sarah Sanders and her family hounded out of a Virginia restaurant while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife were harassed by young men. More recently, John McCain’s memorial services became a weeklong taunt to the president—all by the same people applauding each other for their exquisite decency.
The denouement was telling as well. Two days after McCain was laid to rest at his beloved U.S. Naval Academy, the Senate Judiciary Committee began confirmation hearings for Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Talk about incivility and norm-breaking. Leave aside the disruptive audience members. When Democratic senators weren’t interrupting Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, they were attempting to smear a decent and respected husband, father and jurist. Surely the proposition that Mr. Trump has a monopoly on rudeness and incivility took a beating from the antics of Sen. Cory Booker.
Of course, the New Jersey Democrat’s conscious defiance of Senate decorum is but the latest in a long line of progressive norm-shattering. Anyone remember when the New York Times announced on its front page that the journalistic norm of objectivity shouldn’t apply to Mr. Trump?
Or the reporter who used the F-word in a tweet accusing the president of incest with his daughter, and yet has not been rendered morally unfit by the world of journalism?
Or, less salaciously, those who illegally unmasked national security adviser Mike Flynn? Those who have leaked the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders? What about Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who refused a lawful presidential order?
This is civility? These are people concerned with norms? Forgive those Americans who concur with blogger Ann Althouse that today’s pious demands for civility are often less about good manners than shutting down folks with an opposing view. Certainly the anti-Trump side has indulged in plenty of the latter, whether it be the Obama Internal Revenue Service targeting tea party, pro-Israel and pro-life nonprofits for harassment or rioters who would rather set university buildings on fire than allow a conservative point to be uttered on a woke campus.
On top of this, anyone even vaguely familiar with how respectable Washington defamed Judge Robert Bork and grossly distorted his record during his Supreme Court hearings further appreciates that incivility didn’t start when Mr. Trump came to town. It wasn’t all that long ago when Republicans were—falsely—blamed for a nutjob’s shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011.
During our last national outburst of disquisitions on political comity, columnist Froma Harrop, as head of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, was running something called “the Civility Project.” In 2012, John Oliver of “The Daily Show” had great sport with Ms. Harrop for seeing no contradiction between her leading the charge for civility even as she defended likening tea partiers to al Qaeda terrorists.
None of this justifies Mr. Trump’s own excesses. But it may help explain why so many on the receiving end of today’s civility sermons aren’t buying.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com
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