The F-Word Is Not Enough

Explain why a felon, or at least this felon, must not become president.

Two quick caveats up top: Referring to Donald Trump as a “felon” or a “convicted felon” ad nauseam, at every opportunity, isn’t a “mistake” or “falling into a trap” or anything braindead senators huffing MAGA spin might spit up. It’s certainly better than squandering the political value of Trump’s criminal record altogether.

But it isn’t adequate. And I don’t mean that in the sense I articulated Tuesday, where Democrats should think beyond rhetoric, and take official actions that propel Trump’s convictions back into above-the-fold news. I mean it on its own terms—as a piece of rhetoric, in the formal sense, it proves too much.

That may even be a bit generous, because it actually isn’t much of an argument at all. “Trump is now a felon, ergo he shouldn’t be president” treats the conclusion as self evident.

As a mantra, it reminds me of early days of the resistance, when influential liberals would wear out the letters THIS IS NOT NORMAL on their keyboards, as they logged and sounded warnings over each of Trump’s transgressions. It’s not that they were wrong, it’s that they frequently didn’t fill in the gaps for people who weren’t already read in. Trump did something aberrant, it wasn’t normal. Ok so what? Why is the norm important? Why is upholding it good? Why is traducing it bad? Why is enlisting likeminded foreign leaders in your presidential campaign bad, as opposed to just abnormal? Why is promising to ban Muslims bad, as opposed to just abnormal? The answers are obvious to me and you, but not necessarily to all persuadable people.

Over time, I think this approach contributed to the mass desensitization that has helped Trump claw his way back into political viability. Republicans implicitly exploit the idea that there’s nothing wrong per se with being “abnormal” every time they assert, disingenuously, that Trump’s “mean tweets” were a small price to pay for a president as perfect and handsome he was.

And my fear is that repeated invocations of the f-word, divorced from any values-based arguments about what exactly is so disqualifying, risks acclimating persuadable people in the same way. 

FULL-COURT PRECEDENT

Here’s a memorable¹ example of a less rhetorically loaded argument by assertion falling flat.