From the White House to Harvard, America's norms are being shredded
By Michael A. Cohen GLOBE COLUMNIST SEPTEMBER 15, 2017
If there is one defining characteristic of the sinfulness of the Trump administration, it’s the daily and calamitous shredding of America’s unwritten political and institutional norms. It began during the campaign when Trump refused to hand over his taxes and talked about putting his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in jail. It continued in January when Trump refused to fully divest himself from his business interests, thus ensuring that he would personally profit from being president. Since then, in ways both small and large, this process has continued unabated.
These norm violations are so pervasive that they hardly seem to get much attention. For example, this week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested the Department of Justice should consider prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for leaking information and committing perjury. Let’s put aside the fact that Sanders is attempting to discredit a potential witness against the president for obstruction of justice. It’s inappropriate for the White House to be applying political pressure on the Justice Department regarding prosecutorial decisions, and this is a clear violation of a long-standing norm regarding the DoJ’s prosecutorial independence. But considering the president has publicly criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not protecting him from the Russia investigation and has publicly admitted that he sought to obstruct justice in firing Comey, none of this should come as a real surprise.
At the same press briefing, Sanders also said that Jemele Hill, an ESPN journalist, should be fired for calling Trump a racist and “white supremacist.” Her remarks come from a White House that has called the free press the “enemy of the American people” and termed it “fake news.” It’s yet another extraordinary defilement of a once sacrosanct political norm regarding a free press and how the White House handles criticism. In Trump’s America, however, those norms seemingly no longer exist. And it’s not just happening in Washington.
Consider the decision by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government to grant fellowships to former White House spokesperson Sean Spicer and convicted felon, Chelsea Manning. The latter selection has created the greatest controversy, and for good reason. Whatever one might think of Manning’s rationale for leaking 750,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, there is no question that she broke the law and potentially put the lives of Americans and those who worked with the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq at risk. While personally I supported President Obama’s decision to commute Manning’s sentence, and I’m inclined to chalk up her crimes more to youthful naiveté than traitorous intentions, there’s little question that Manning’s leak undermined US national security and had the potential to do enormous harm. It is not something to be celebrated.
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