‘The President Speaks For Himself’

New York Times (Editorial) 

August 29, 2017

‘The President Speaks For Himself’ 

It should be among the easier tasks of a cabinet member to affirm, without hesitation, that the president he or she serves represents the values of the American people.

But that was more than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could muster during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Asked by Chris Wallace whether President Trump’s morally vacuous response to the racist march and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., made his job harder, Mr. Tillerson said, “I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values or the commitment of the American government or the government’s agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.”

“And the president’s values?” Mr. Wallace asked. Mr. Tillerson replied, “The president speaks for himself, Chris.”

Coming from the man the president picked to represent the nation around the world, it was a stunning admission, devastating in its simplicity and painful in its accuracy.

Mr. Trump, we are reminded every day in ways we would not have imagined the day before, speaks and acts in the interests of himself and no one else.

That disturbing truth was nowhere more evident than in Mr. Trump’s pardon, late Friday night, of the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, which he issued, in his cowardly way, as the nation was riveted to the impending landfall of Hurricane Harvey.

To most people with any awareness of Arizona politics, Mr. Arpaio is an abomination to the rule of law, the principle of equal justice and plain decency. He spent a good part of his near-quarter-century in office terrorizing the Latinos of southern Arizona, locking them up for the crime of having brown skin, abusing and humiliating them, refusing to stop even after a federal judge told him to, and arresting journalists for reporting on it all.

Yet to President Trump, Mr. Arpaio is a role model: a man for whom the “rule of law” means that he can do what he wants when he wants, who humiliates those weaker than him and mocks those who try to constrain him, who evades scrutiny and accountability — in short, a perfect little tyrant.

The president can pardon virtually anyone he wants, which makes it more telling that he chose to wield the power for the first time in favor of Mr. Arpaio, an officer of the law who defied a court order. It shows not only contempt for the judiciary’s sole means of enforcing the law, but suggests that Mr. Trump may be just as eager to pardon friends, family and allies caught up in the Russia investigation.

The Arpaio pardon is not only morally reprehensible on its own, it is also in line with Mr. Trump’s broader attitude toward law enforcement. Consider his affection for the Milwaukee County sheriff, David Clarke, an Arpaio in waiting who has called activists in the Black Lives Matter movement “terrorists” and who runs a county jail where inmates have a tendency to die under suspicious circumstances. (On Sunday morning, as Hurricane Harvey raged across Texas, Mr. Trump tweeted out a plug for Mr. Clarke’s new book and called him a “great guy.”)

The pattern goes back much further, as The Times’s Maggie Haberman wrote on Monday. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump endorsed the use of torture on terrorism suspects, encouraged supporters at his rallies to assault protesters and made racially tinged comments about a judge overseeing a case involving Trump University.

In his seven months as president, Mr. Trump has attacked federal judges who ruled against the administration’s travel ban; tried to impede investigations into his allies, including Mr. Arpaio; and exhorted police officers to treat suspects roughly — which earned a quick rebuke from his own Justice Department and police officials around the country.

Rebukes, from his advisers and members of Congress, grow more frequent. Gary Cohn, director of the White House Economic Council, nearly resigned after Mr. Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. House Speaker Paul Ryan said he opposed the Arpaio pardon, and Senator John McCain said it undermined Mr. Trump’s “claim for the respect of rule of law.”

But this is Donald Trump’s rule of law — a display of personal dominance disconnected from concerns about law and order, equality or the Constitution. That distorted understanding of justice is cleaving the nation between the majority who support the principles of American democracy and those who support only him.

A version of this editorial appears in print on August 29, 2017, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘The President Speaks for Himself’.

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