When asked to define “hard-core pornography,” in the 1964 case of a French film that the state of Ohio had banned as obscene, the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave us an immortal rejoinder: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within the shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so,” he wrote. “But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
That’s how most Americans, regardless of politics or ideology, feel about indecency. They know it when they see it. And on this one point, we are mostly agreed — Donald Trump is no longer just a second-rate Bond villain manque. In a fractious, pluralistic political environment, he’s become the personification of indecency itself. We all know this because we can see it in all of its terrible orange-ish majesty.
Last week at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, an American Muslim named Khizr Khan made the case that Muslim Americans have made sacrifices for this country, too. It was a simple proposition that should have been a given, but isn’t thanks to hateful demagogues who have convinced many of their fellow Americans that patriotism and Islam are incompatible.
Mr. Khan, a Pakistani-born lawyer who took his degree at Harvard, spoke with bitter pride of the loss of his son, U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004. His wife, Ghazala, stood at his side trying to maintain her composure while her dead son’s face filled the screen above their heads. Pulling a paperback copy of the U.S. Constitution from his breast pocket, Mr. Khan questioned whether Mr. Trump had ever read it. He graciously offered it to him, a gesture met with thunderous applause by Democrats who couldn’t wait to engage in full-throated, Reagan-style patriotism for once.
Mr. Khan made his point. If Mr. Trump’s draconian immigration rules that would bar Muslims from coming to America had been in effect when his family migrated here in 1980, patriots like his son would not have had the opportunity to serve, much less sacrifice their lives for their country. With all the rhetorical thunder he could muster, Mr. Khan asked Mr. Trump, a wealthy, privileged Vietnam-era draft dodger, what he had ever sacrificed. Everyone knew what the answer was: nothing.
Sitting in utter darkness somewhere gnawing on goat entrails, conservative provocateur Ann Coulter immediately zipped off a response to Mr. Khan on Twitter that reminds all of us that evil is gender-neutral: “You know what this convention really needed? An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed [Zakaria],” she tweeted. As juvenile and nakedly racist as it was, it established the intellectual template for the Trump tweets and statements that would follow.
Ignoring the taunts of multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg because he’s too afraid to punch above his economic weight class, Donald Trump turned his impotent fury not at Mr. Khan, but to Ghazala. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC over the weekend, he mused that she probably didn’t say anything onstage last Thursday because she was ordered to be quiet — a taunt that prompted Mrs. Khan to loosen her tongue in a scorching Washington Post piece and in dual interviews with her husband over the weekend. If anything, the heartbreak of her son’s death has made her even more eloquent than her husband. For his part, Mr. Khan accused Mr. Trump of having a “black soul” and mocked him as a creature devoid of empathy and decency common to most of humanity.
Donald Trump didn’t squander any opportunity to prove Mr. Khan correct in his assessment. He accused Hillary Clinton’s people of writing the grieving father’s extemporaneous speech, ignoring the fact that in doing so they gave some of the best lines of the week to their Muslim surrogate. It was another example of the wild swings a panicked and demoralized Donald Trump is capable of when the whole country is laughing at him.
Still, even as the GOP establishment denounced him as intemperate — but still worthy of being president of the United States — his most amoral surrogates took the opportunity to engage in the dark arts of smear-merchanting that had gotten their campaign this far.
Trump loyalist and former adviser Roger Stone scraped the bottom of the pro-Trump barrel by passing along this tidbit on Twitter: “Mr. Khan more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son — he’s Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary.” And so it went all weekend. The most reactionary, racist ratholes on the America right repeated the slander concocted by Walid and Theodore Shoebat, the father-son “radical Muslims turned Christian” Palestinian-Americans, who insisted Mr. Khan works for a terror group and that his son was a deep-cover sleeper agent who was killed by terrorist friendly fire before he could harm his fellow soldiers.
To their credit, Mr. Trump’s surrogates, a hysterical retinue of quislings who will become instantly unemployable when he loses in November, don’t deny the fundamental indecency of their fascist sugar daddy’s candidacy. Not only do they accept Donald Trump’s indecency as a viable political position in the modern world, they celebrate it. They know indecency when they see it, too, and they like it.
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631; Twitter @TonyNormanPG.
First Published: August 2, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
