by Bob Bauer (former White House Counsel to President Obama)
***this is the crucial point: How Donald Trump constructs his attacks makes all the difference. The practice of demagoguery, which defines the president’s leadership style, changes the rules of the democratic game. It savages any and all constitutional, institutional and as necessary legal limits the leader deems inconsistent with the pursuit of personal interests and self-aggrandizement. It works to make the abandonment of these limits plausible now to the audience he is trying to reach. In the service of its goals, demagoguery features extreme appeals and—critically—a reckless indifference to the facts, even outright lies.
The “moment” Trump seems to be striving for cannot arrive and serve his purposes unless he builds toward it with his speech. He is creating conditions now to support further action later; but the creation of those conditions, though by words, is itself an activity. If later Trump refuses Mueller an interview, supported by the groundwork previously laid, it will be correct to say that the move depended on what he did to set the stage. In other words, Trump is seeking to accomplish something with his demagoguery.
The Founders understood that demagoguery was not an idle matter of mere words. As the political scientist Jeffrey Tulis has written, their concern with demagoguery was one of the “core issues behind the practical structural decisions for the national government and the place of the presidency in it.” Those structures have, of course, undergone radical change and the safeguards originally erected against the demagogue have withered. But it does not follow that because the protections have begun to fail, we should be less troubled by the pathology they were intended to defend against. The word/action distinction operates to make it less likely that we will take the pathology seriously—until “things have happened.”
Demagoguery as the defining feature of political leadership is very much happening. As Tulis has stressed, “rhetorical power is a very special case of executive power … it is a power itself.” So it is a mistake to dismiss demagogic practice on the grounds that it is pure speech that, even if regrettable, can be otherwise disregarded until the occurrence of some related “action.”
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