What An Abortion

In Trump’s America, bad manners are the least of it: consider, writes Paul Thomas, the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Who would have thought it? Apparently, the defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency isn’t the Russian connection or corruption or the demonisation of the media. It’s not the assault on the concepts of objective truth and empirical knowledge. It’s not the pandering to the paranoia of the most ignorant and bigoted elements in US society.

It’s the collapse of civility; it’s anti-Trumpers forgetting their manners.

Ungraciousness abounds. Actor Robert De Niro and comedian Samantha Bee hurled foul-mouthed derision at the President and his daughter Ivanka; White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was ejected from a restaurant just for being Sarah Huckabee Sanders; administration officials can’t go out for a Mexican without being hounded by protesters; Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a 79-year-old grandmother, for goodness’ sake, calls for a society in which Trump’s people are made to feel unwelcome wherever they go. Where will it end?

According to some commentators, not all of them on the right, this amounts to losing the plot and surrendering the moral high ground. “The ‘civility’ debate turns on whether certain expressions of anti-Trump anger are justified,” wrote the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “and, if they are, whether they are nonetheless politically counterproductive.”

Strangely, incivility isn’t an issue when it flows in the opposite direction. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Trump welcomed ageing rocker Ted Nugent into the Oval Office. Nugent had called Barack Obama a “sub-human mongrel”, Hillary Clinton a “toxic c---”, and advocated that both be lynched.