BY MARTIN KICH

When I first drafted this post about a week ago, I did not realize that the Trump administration’s talking points on the Mueller investigation would so quickly boil down to the following: (1) if the president is now openly admitting what he previously lied about, then there is no subterfuge and therefore no collusion and (2) since the president has already established that the media is full of fake news, then any facts that the media reports are illegitimate. On the first point, several people involved in the Watergate hearings have pointed out that the argument seems to be that if the president is now openly stating what had to be painstakingly uncovered within secret Nixon administration tapes and memos, then the revelations must be regarded as something other than a “smoking gun.” On the second point, the core paradox is, of course, that the media is credible only to the extent that it reports the president’s charge that most of its other reporting on him is not credible.

In any case, on a daily basis, new developments in this escalating political crisis are illustrating why the role of historians and political scientists as “public intellectuals” ought to be a topic of very pressing interest. And, as Joan Scott’s post “The Central European University under Siege” demonstrates, academic freedom is every bit as vulnerable as freedom of the press and other fundamental principles of a free society, and it should be considered as fundamental as those other freedoms are to the preservation of a free society.

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I have no expertise in political rhetoric, but I have been collecting items on President Trump’s uses and abuses of language and on the ways in which he has violated norms for people holding high office—and, in many cases, norms simply for people in general.

Much of the commentary intended to place his behavior in some understandable context has been comparative, whether to other figures in American history or leaders of other countries, for the most part demagogues and authoritarian figures.

In a number of instances, historians and political commentators have attempted to explain Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency not as a historical anomaly but as the culmination of long-developing political, economic, and cultural trends. In essence, these historians and commentators have argued that Trump has not so much created this historical moment but, instead, has seized on it.

But I can find no recent precedent for the blatant egotism that he expresses at every opportunity. In fact, I can remember when a brief lapse in composure, a brief exhibition of behavior deemed non-presidential, was enough to doom a candidacy.

I am old enough to recall in 1972 Edmund Muskie’s responding to charges that he was biased against Americans of French-Canadian ethnicity and angrily denouncing the editor of the Manchester Guardian who Muskie felt had insulted his wife. It was February in New Hampshire. Muskie was clearly so angry that he briefly lost his composure several times, but as snowflakes melted on his somewhat contorted face, some media outlets reported that he was tearing up. His presidential hopes melted away as quickly as the snowflakes.

It is now almost a half-century since 1972, and while that may seem as if it is a very long time ago, in historical terms, it is very recent history.

But I also recall that, much more recently, in 2008, Howard Dean responded to a disappointing finish in the Iowa caucuses by trying to rally his supporters as the primaries moved to New Hampshire, next door to his home state of Vermont and likely to be more favorable ground for his campaign. Dean stood at a podium in his shirtsleeves, looking somewhat overheated, and he not so much shouted as screeched: “Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York. . . . And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we’re going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Yeah!” This moment was deemed so oddly unpresidential that his campaign was essentially over before he left the podium.

It was weird, but it was nothing really at all comparable to these three small items that have appeared in the last week or so—the first two, in fact, on the same day.

 

Item from Crooks and Liars:

On Thanksgiving, Trump Tells the Media He’s Most Thankful For Himself

As he was leaving a reporter asked, “What are you most thankful for, Mr. President?”

Trump replied, “For having a great family and for having made a tremendous difference in this country. I made a tremendous difference in the country. This country is so much stronger now than it was when I took office that you won’t believe it and I mean, you see it, but so much stronger that people can’t even believe it.”

 

Item from the Washington Post:

Trump Says That He Cannot Imagine Anyone but Trump Being Time’s Person of the Year

President Trump was asked by a reporter Tuesday about Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which comes out every December.

 And he had one answer for who should be Person of the Year: “Trump.”

“I don’t know, that is up to Time magazine,” he said, noting that he had been given the distinction in 2016. “I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trump. Can you imagine anybody else other than Trump?”

 

More Recent Item from the Washington Post:

Trump Says He Is among Those Who “Have Very High Levels of Intelligence” but Are Not “Believers” in Climate Change

President Trump on Tuesday dismissed a landmark report compiled by 13 federal agencies detailing how damages from global warming are intensifying around the country. The comments marked the president’s most extensive yet on why he disagrees with his own government’s analysis, which found that climate change poses a severe threat to the health of Americans, as well as to the country’s infrastructure, economy and natural resources.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump told The Washington Post when asked why he was skeptical of the dire National Climate Assessment released Friday.

 

It is certainly important for journalists to continue to fact-check President Trump’s misrepresentations of the truth and to point out his self-contradictions and outright lies. But it seems equally important that historians and political scientists address the ways in which he is not so much resetting our longstanding expectations of those holding high office but simply ignoring them or, perhaps, demonstrating his ignorance of them. To some extent Jon Meacham and Michael Beschloss have been taking on this task on the cable news programs. But I think that a broader effort is needed.

The GOP has always defined itself as the party most committed to preserving traditional American values. They certainly would have scrutinized everything Hillary Clinton would have said and done if she had been elected president, much as they scrutinized everything that Barack Obama said and did as president. I recall that when President Obama was disembarking from Air Force One, he once saluted two Marines while holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand, and you would have thought that he had walked passed troops lined up for review and had pissed on them.

This is something more than hyper-partisanship. The new normal is not normal, and it should not be accepted as normal. It should not be allowed to be normalized simply because those who are supposed to be meeting and reinforcing norms have chosen to pretend that the norms do not exist—or, perhaps more precisely, that they are somehow exempt from being measured against norms.

Historians and political scientists do not need to be overtly partisan. Indeed, exhibiting overt political partisanship would be counterproductive because it would make it easier to dismiss their expertise. But they do need to become more vocal “public intellectuals”—to point out that what is occurring is, in fact, unprecedented. They ought to seize the moment–to demonstrate that, at certain historical moments, their expertise is every bit as essential as the expertise that faculty in other disciplines demonstrate in other public spheres in times of crisis.

In short, this is an opportunity to demonstrate the very practical value of the social sciences within a democratic society.