Occam's Razor

Karma is a bitch, as a few Trump supporters are finding out. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders was the latest to discover this when she was asked to leave The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Its owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, opted to not serve her and her party.

This is a position that would normally upset me. But recently the Supreme Court ruled that a baker could refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple on religious freedom grounds. Based on that unwise precedent, the Red Hen owner should feel no shame throwing out our nation’s press secretary. Maybe it was not because Sanders’s presence impinged on her religious freedom. More likely she was just offended that the woman was publicly promoting the racist agenda of Donald Trump. So karma, otherwise known as “what goes around, comes around”, made itself known to Sanders in a very personal way.

In fact the majority of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump and his immigration policy in particular. We are totally appalled by our openly racist administration and by the wholesale lack of feeling for others unlike themselves that Trump and his cronies gleefully perpetuate.

Unlike many Trump supporters whose hatred of those of us who don’t like him regularly result in nasty or violent actions, virtually none of us anti-Trumpsters have practiced violence against Trump supporters. Trump supporters though seem totally appalled by what they characterize as uncivil behavior from us, even though they dish it out daily. I don’t quite get this in this particular case. Sanders was told to leave but not hissed at. She did not have rotting vegetables thrown at her person or her car. She was not screamed at and called colorful words, at least as far as we can tell. Instead, Stephanie Wilkinson decided to shun her.

Shunning is a nonviolent form of disapproval. Shunning essentially means “you are so far outside the mainstream that I can’t interact with you.” The motivation for shunning is usually pretty obvious. More often, the shunning is for unacceptable reasons. Some would say Sanders’s shunning was unacceptable, but I don’t. But when you represent an administration that chronically lies and refuses to actually follow the law it is supposed to uphold, shunning is about the least you can do to say this sort of behavior is disgusting and beyond the pale. It may not be civil but it’s not illegal.

If Donald Trump doesn’t want to be shunned, he must start acting as a real president, i.e. a civilized human being. To start, he could stop bullying people on Twitter. It’s constant and pathological, which is why I don’t expect it to change. In addition, he could start upholding his oath of office. He swore to defend the Constitution of the United States, which includes apparently pesky provisions like the 5^th amendment, which ensures due process for everyone including asylum seekers. If he wants to change the law, he could do it the old fashioned way by building coalitions in Congress. He can’t be bothered because that would require actual work.

Real Americans realize our laws are imperfect but we respect our system of government, our constitution and our laws. If we don’t like them, we use constitutional means to try to change them. Obviously this is quite hard to do at the moment given our gerrymandered congress and state legislatures, but we are still doing this lawfully and openly. We are the true patriots. Trump and his administration prove every day through increasingly egregious actions that they don’t. In fact, our president is so dumb that apparently he thought he could change immigration law through decree.

So thank you Stephanie Wilkinson, who is but the latest case of people taking more aggressive but legal action against Trumpsters for their wholesale flaunting of our norms, laws and constitution. It’s not too hard to predict that there will be a whole lot more of this in the months and years ahead as the normally shy among us begin to feel more empowered, thanks to people like Ms. Wilkinson. If anything, we have bent over backwards to be civil when civility was never returned.

Decent people must and should shun Trumpsters, particularly those like Sanders who actually implement his policies. They should also be publicly shamed. None of this will change their behavior. In fact, it is likely to inflame them. But that’s not the point. The point is for the true moral majority among us to stand up and demonstrate loud and clear that these actions are wholly unacceptable in our democracy. In doing so, we expose the bully for whom he is, help reestablish the norms of civilized behavior and encourage others like us to stand with determination and conviction for our constitution and the rule of law.