Suddenly, the watchword about Donald Trump and the nation, about the world’s wars, about how we treat each other seems to be “defiant.”
We’re choosing to reject more civil communications, entreaties for treaties, and — in different ways — ruing culture wars raging only because we choose to keep them hot. And we’re losing our words of condemnation for all of it because of numbness from a constant fire hose of self-centered defiance.
If you’re part of Team Trump, “defiance” seems to mean moving now to crush dissent. If you’re a critic, “defiance” is raising a fist in the face of someone trying to dictate how to think.
The truth seems to be that we’re hanging onto impatient explanation that if one side keeps being jerky, the other side will simply relent over time because of pace and persistence. We’re seeing those sentiments playing out in Israel’s choices to ignore virtually global advice to end the war in Gaza, defiantly sending ground troops into Gaza City for what must turn into another bloody offensive. We’re seeing it in a recalcitrant Russia that would rather thumb its nose defiantly in the face of Western powers than halt its attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets.
And we’re seeing it in our continued high-decibel defiance about trying to keep our own political talk from descending further into the very political violence that we insist, loudly, that we want to avoid. Not only is this seemingly stubborn attitude ill-chosen, but this belligerent trend seems a deliberate choice for the Trump administration and for frustrated critics.
Targeting Dissent
Even if you see yourself as outside the partisan fray, it is impossible not to see continued defiance of law in the unauthorized deployments of military units to U.S. city streets and the many excesses of a deportation campaign turned obsessively cruel, defiance of national and international laws in the arbitrariness of the tariffs and in the decisions to cut health and food support for tax cuts for the wealthy.
If sinking one alleged Venezuelan drug boat on international waters is legally hazy, this administration doubles down with a second. Defiance demands it.
Away from law, Trump seems to believe that he defiantly can rewrite history to erase slavery or turn the Jan. 6, 2021 revolt into a patriotic event or can wave a wand to eliminate America’s insistence on finding groups or identities to hate by saying they simply do not exist.
The drive to “go after” those with dissenting political views in the name of supporting “free speech” is not only illogical, but anti-democratic. The Trump administration wants to defy the Constitution, our two centuries of balance of powers, even the cultural wars of pluralism.
Amazingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi was forced to back down from a statement that “hate speech” is not “free speech,” using a social media post to say she meant threats of violence — this week in the tumult that has followed the slaying of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. In fact, there is no Constitutional distinction between hate speech and free speech, but the law does make threats distinct as a form of action rather than opinion.
Nevertheless, Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Vice President JD Vance and various White House staff were threatening to investigate and punish anyone with published remarks glorifying, celebrating or condoning the death — a campaign of defiance, not law wrongly conflates language about political violence with anything that rebuts right-wing partisanship. Bondi went further, killing a DOJ study that had concluded that violence was far more likely to come from right-wing extremists than those from the left.
Beyond what they say, it is not clear what Bondi and Justice intend to do or what will constitute legally supportable action to quash opinion, or how they will identify dissent.
‘Hate in Your Heart’
In no case is one government agency, especially one dominated by one individual, elected as the hall monitor for distasteful or noxious speech. Donald Trump is making clear he sees no need for legal distinctions. For Trump, “hate speech” is anything he doesn’t like personally.
Amid calls to lower political temperatures, Trump defiantly showed he would verbally attack reporters asking him questions that he finds embarrassing or not sufficiently highlighting his achievements. He told one reporter whose question he disliked that the journalist had “hate in his heart” for Trump. He told an Australian journalist that his question would put the U.S. relationship with his nation at risk.
A $15-billion Trump lawsuit against The New York Times charging defamation and libel for reporting, editorials, even books by Times reporters about himself was absurdly broad and never actually challenged any factual newspaper report — just a lack of adoring coverage, not the job of my former employer. Among other things, he challenged the Times’ endorsement of his opponent, Kamala Harris.
Team Trump’s pressure on ABC and its broadcasters to pull late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for making basically the same point as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox — that the suspect from the Charlie Kirk killing was from a family steeped in MAGA thinking until a year ago — is “defiance” raised to an extreme. The only surprise is the ease with which the undercutting won approval.
To avoid its own public defiance, Great Britain went out of its way to plan a Trump presidential visit to Windsor Castle that would simply avoid a route for protesters. Weirdly, it was comforting to see that protesters had gone ahead and projected Trump and Jeffrey Epstein against the castle walls.
Photo by Luis Quintero via Pexels
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