1. Jack Holmes is Associate Editor for News & Politics at Esquire.com, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce. He also does a dash of sports and some feature writing. His work has appeared in New York magazine and The Daily Beast.
The following are excerpts from Jack Holmes' February 1, 2018 article headlined "The Death of Shame, or the Rise of Shamelessness?" with subheading "What defines American politics as we enter year two of the Trump presidency?"
(Begin excerpts)
“I’m the least racist person you will ever interview,” President Trump told a gaggle of reporters earlier this month. Trump was responding to reports that he had dismissed all 54 countries of Africa as “shitholes” and wondered why the U.S. didn’t prioritize immigrants from places like Norway. Previously, the president reportedly insisted Nigerians who come here would never "go back to their huts in Africa,” and suggested Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS.” Trump began his political career with a loud and completely evidence-free campaign to prove Barack Obama, America's first black president, was born in Kenya. He also repeatedly suggested that Obama, who was editor of the Harvard Law Review, could not have gotten into Ivy League schools legitimately. On the morning Trump formally declared his intent to run for President, he characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.
In the 1970s, Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination against black New Yorkers. In 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death penalty for a group of black and brown 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds convicted in the Central Park Jogger rape case, and continued to advocate for it 14 years later when their wrongful conviction was overturned. During the 2016 campaign, Trump spread disgusting propaganda about black-on-white crime and lied about the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border. Before his inauguration in January, Trump attacked John Lewis, who marched for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.—and was nearly beaten to death by an Alabama state trooper at Selma—as "all talk” and “no action." Trump once said a federal judge could not preside over his case fairly because the judge’s parents were Mexican.
Yet the incident in January marked at least the third time Trump has publicly deemed himself “the least racist person” alive. This is a ludicrous thing for anyone to say. Gandhi wouldn’t say it. The whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. that some remember wouldn’t say it. It is simply shameless, and there is no better word to describe this president or the political era that he has ushered in.
As we embark on a second year of this presidency, more and more of our public officials now feel they can say anything, even when they previously said the opposite, or when we can readily see their falsehoods. More and more of our country's leaders are steadfastly, almost impressively, impervious to shame.
"Shame is a particularly useful tool in enforcing social norms," says Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University and the author of Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool. "You may risk being arrested by the police for indecent exposure if you appear naked in Washington Square Park, but you certainly risk a lot of shame. That's the thing that the crowd is still allowed to do. I'm not allowed to put you in prison, or throw rocks at you, but the vigilantism, the power of the audience—the crowd—still exists in this role of public opprobrium."
In recent months, there have been signs that shame hasn't utterly vanished from our politics. At the end of 2017, Al Franken and John Conyers, two Democratic members of Congress, were pressured to resign amid sexual harassment allegations. So, too, was Republican Tim Murphy. If anything, though, the larger #MeToo movement is about the establishment of new norms around gender equality and abuse of power. It also doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. The nauseating Blake Farenthold of Texas remains a United States congressman despite using $84,000 in taxpayer money to settle a sexual harassment claim. Yesterday, Farenthold backed off his pledge to pay the money back. There's also our president, who has been accused of misconduct by 19 different women. Trump shamelessly called out Franken and continues to insist that the women he himself has been accused by are liars.
Shame may or may not have had an effect on Sean Spicer. The former White House press secretary apologized this week for the “embarrassment” he caused himself and his family while serving in the West Wing. Spicer lied incessantly and rewrote the history of the Holocaust from the White House podium with his infamous "Even Hitler" rant. But nothing compares to his first ever press conference, when he kicked off the Trump presidency with the ludicrous claim his boss had attracted the largest inauguration crowd in history—"period"—and that photos to the contrary were somehow doctored or misleading.
As the title of Jacquet's book suggests, shame is an ancient social tool. It's a punishment for violating social norms that don't quite amount to breaking the law. If you suggested those who march alongside Nazis in the street can be "very fine people" at an office holiday party, your coworkers would probably back away slowly—and file a complaint with HR. Clearly, however, shame has lost a step, at least at the highest levels of our politics.
"Inherently, politics involves exaggeration," says John Geer, a Political Science professor at Vanderbilt University. "But usually those exaggerations had some basis in fact. You were spinning the results, you were spinning the data. But it had some basis—not necessarily a lot—in reality. Right now, the big problem is that the claims people are making are often just inconsistent with what we know. They are lies—or the whole idea of alternative facts."
Trump’s particular attitude towards reality is not restricted to his views on people of color. He’s also "the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your life." You should know that "nobody loves the Bible more,” even if his favorite passage is “Two Corinthians.” There’s nobody that “respects women more,” although he does attack the appearance of any woman, like Megyn Kelly or Mika Brzezinski, who challenges him.
Trump attacked John McCain, a senator from his own party who spent five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, as a loser who got captured. Trump spent those same years getting draft deferments and called avoiding sexually transmitted disease in ‘70s New York his "personal Vietnam." He peddled the insane conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the JFK assassination. He flouted the norm of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns, historically a gesture of transparency meant to show they will not bring conflicts of interest into office. Trump tapped his family, many of whom bring their own conflicts, to be among his most senior advisers. Many of those he appointed to leadership roles essentially made a career out of trying to destroy the agencies they now run.
But above all, Trump continues to disseminate false information at a breathtaking, surely unprecedented clip—then screams that any reporter or news outlet that challenges him is spreading Fake News. By his 355th day in office, The Washington Post assessed that the president had made 2,000 false or misleading claims. Remember when The Wall was going to cost $12 billion and Mexico was going to pay for it? Now the president is asking for $25 billion in American taxpayer cash.
Trump quite clearly does not believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse. He believes anything he says is true so long as enough of his supporters believe it. This has allowed him to trample the norms of our democratic politics with almost complete impunity. As president, he has outlasted any and all attempts by his peers or the public to shame him.
"We've kind of seen a sea change here on shame and shamelessness," says Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University. "I'm giving my lecture course this semester, and I did McCarthyism. I played the famous clip of Joseph Welch: 'Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last.' It took the air out of McCarthy. I don't think it would work today. Now, with the charges that everything is fake news, there's no sense that if you're caught in a lie, the public will turn on you. In a new era dominated by cries that everything is fake news, there can be no truth. And without truth, there can be no shame."
Trump's shamelessness has filtered down into society, much like the apocryphal story about John F. Kennedy eschewing the tradition of top hats. "You have these people in society called 'norm entrepreneurs,'" Jacquet says. "The leadership sets the tone for the country." One of Trump's longest-serving aides, Kellyanne Conway, coined that infamous term, "alternative facts," to unwittingly describe the White House's approach to the truth. She illustrated it at every opportunity, which included cooking up a non-existent terror attack called "the Bowling Green Massacre” to justify the president’s Definitely Not a Muslim Ban. When called out on it, Conway claimed to have misspoken that one time—until it emerged she had peddled the would-be tragedy on other occasions. Conway also once made the astounding claim that a proposed $880 billion Medicaid cut did not constitute a cut to Medicaid.
The following are excerpts from Jack Holmes' February 1, 2018 article headlined "The Death of Shame, or the Rise of Shamelessness?" with subheading "What defines American politics as we enter year two of the Trump presidency?"
(Begin excerpts)
“I’m the least racist person you will ever interview,” President Trump told a gaggle of reporters earlier this month. Trump was responding to reports that he had dismissed all 54 countries of Africa as “shitholes” and wondered why the U.S. didn’t prioritize immigrants from places like Norway. Previously, the president reportedly insisted Nigerians who come here would never "go back to their huts in Africa,” and suggested Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS.” Trump began his political career with a loud and completely evidence-free campaign to prove Barack Obama, America's first black president, was born in Kenya. He also repeatedly suggested that Obama, who was editor of the Harvard Law Review, could not have gotten into Ivy League schools legitimately. On the morning Trump formally declared his intent to run for President, he characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.
In the 1970s, Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination against black New Yorkers. In 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death penalty for a group of black and brown 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds convicted in the Central Park Jogger rape case, and continued to advocate for it 14 years later when their wrongful conviction was overturned. During the 2016 campaign, Trump spread disgusting propaganda about black-on-white crime and lied about the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border. Before his inauguration in January, Trump attacked John Lewis, who marched for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.—and was nearly beaten to death by an Alabama state trooper at Selma—as "all talk” and “no action." Trump once said a federal judge could not preside over his case fairly because the judge’s parents were Mexican.
Yet the incident in January marked at least the third time Trump has publicly deemed himself “the least racist person” alive. This is a ludicrous thing for anyone to say. Gandhi wouldn’t say it. The whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. that some remember wouldn’t say it. It is simply shameless, and there is no better word to describe this president or the political era that he has ushered in.
As we embark on a second year of this presidency, more and more of our public officials now feel they can say anything, even when they previously said the opposite, or when we can readily see their falsehoods. More and more of our country's leaders are steadfastly, almost impressively, impervious to shame.
"Shame is a particularly useful tool in enforcing social norms," says Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University and the author of Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool. "You may risk being arrested by the police for indecent exposure if you appear naked in Washington Square Park, but you certainly risk a lot of shame. That's the thing that the crowd is still allowed to do. I'm not allowed to put you in prison, or throw rocks at you, but the vigilantism, the power of the audience—the crowd—still exists in this role of public opprobrium."
In recent months, there have been signs that shame hasn't utterly vanished from our politics. At the end of 2017, Al Franken and John Conyers, two Democratic members of Congress, were pressured to resign amid sexual harassment allegations. So, too, was Republican Tim Murphy. If anything, though, the larger #MeToo movement is about the establishment of new norms around gender equality and abuse of power. It also doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. The nauseating Blake Farenthold of Texas remains a United States congressman despite using $84,000 in taxpayer money to settle a sexual harassment claim. Yesterday, Farenthold backed off his pledge to pay the money back. There's also our president, who has been accused of misconduct by 19 different women. Trump shamelessly called out Franken and continues to insist that the women he himself has been accused by are liars.
Shame may or may not have had an effect on Sean Spicer. The former White House press secretary apologized this week for the “embarrassment” he caused himself and his family while serving in the West Wing. Spicer lied incessantly and rewrote the history of the Holocaust from the White House podium with his infamous "Even Hitler" rant. But nothing compares to his first ever press conference, when he kicked off the Trump presidency with the ludicrous claim his boss had attracted the largest inauguration crowd in history—"period"—and that photos to the contrary were somehow doctored or misleading.
As the title of Jacquet's book suggests, shame is an ancient social tool. It's a punishment for violating social norms that don't quite amount to breaking the law. If you suggested those who march alongside Nazis in the street can be "very fine people" at an office holiday party, your coworkers would probably back away slowly—and file a complaint with HR. Clearly, however, shame has lost a step, at least at the highest levels of our politics.
"Inherently, politics involves exaggeration," says John Geer, a Political Science professor at Vanderbilt University. "But usually those exaggerations had some basis in fact. You were spinning the results, you were spinning the data. But it had some basis—not necessarily a lot—in reality. Right now, the big problem is that the claims people are making are often just inconsistent with what we know. They are lies—or the whole idea of alternative facts."
Trump’s particular attitude towards reality is not restricted to his views on people of color. He’s also "the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your life." You should know that "nobody loves the Bible more,” even if his favorite passage is “Two Corinthians.” There’s nobody that “respects women more,” although he does attack the appearance of any woman, like Megyn Kelly or Mika Brzezinski, who challenges him.
Trump attacked John McCain, a senator from his own party who spent five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, as a loser who got captured. Trump spent those same years getting draft deferments and called avoiding sexually transmitted disease in ‘70s New York his "personal Vietnam." He peddled the insane conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the JFK assassination. He flouted the norm of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns, historically a gesture of transparency meant to show they will not bring conflicts of interest into office. Trump tapped his family, many of whom bring their own conflicts, to be among his most senior advisers. Many of those he appointed to leadership roles essentially made a career out of trying to destroy the agencies they now run.
But above all, Trump continues to disseminate false information at a breathtaking, surely unprecedented clip—then screams that any reporter or news outlet that challenges him is spreading Fake News. By his 355th day in office, The Washington Post assessed that the president had made 2,000 false or misleading claims. Remember when The Wall was going to cost $12 billion and Mexico was going to pay for it? Now the president is asking for $25 billion in American taxpayer cash.
Trump quite clearly does not believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse. He believes anything he says is true so long as enough of his supporters believe it. This has allowed him to trample the norms of our democratic politics with almost complete impunity. As president, he has outlasted any and all attempts by his peers or the public to shame him.
"We've kind of seen a sea change here on shame and shamelessness," says Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University. "I'm giving my lecture course this semester, and I did McCarthyism. I played the famous clip of Joseph Welch: 'Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last.' It took the air out of McCarthy. I don't think it would work today. Now, with the charges that everything is fake news, there's no sense that if you're caught in a lie, the public will turn on you. In a new era dominated by cries that everything is fake news, there can be no truth. And without truth, there can be no shame."
Trump's shamelessness has filtered down into society, much like the apocryphal story about John F. Kennedy eschewing the tradition of top hats. "You have these people in society called 'norm entrepreneurs,'" Jacquet says. "The leadership sets the tone for the country." One of Trump's longest-serving aides, Kellyanne Conway, coined that infamous term, "alternative facts," to unwittingly describe the White House's approach to the truth. She illustrated it at every opportunity, which included cooking up a non-existent terror attack called "the Bowling Green Massacre” to justify the president’s Definitely Not a Muslim Ban. When called out on it, Conway claimed to have misspoken that one time—until it emerged she had peddled the would-be tragedy on other occasions. Conway also once made the astounding claim that a proposed $880 billion Medicaid cut did not constitute a cut to Medicaid.
