JOHN BRUMMETT: Why tweets matter

Like most Republicans who are more sane than not, state Sen. Jim Hendren of Gravette was late coming to terms with the affront that is Donald Trump. But Hendren has been busy lately rationalizing his way to acceptance and even apparent admiration.

Hendren tweeted the other day that Trump is playing the media for suckers and driving liberals crazy by deploying what Hendren seemed to view as a triumphantly clever tactic.

It appeared that the state senator beheld Trump's seemingly undisciplined use of Twitter for nonsensical and incendiary posts as smartly designed to dominate news cycles.

Hendren described a Trump-manipulated dynamic by which reporters couldn't help themselves from Pavlovian responses to the "phenomena" of a president-elect's tweeting. That, he suggested, kept the media from reporting on matters Trump presumably didn't want them focusing on.

Hendren was essentially saying reporters should ignore wild public rantings by the next president of the United States.

As much as we'd like to do that ...

Ignoring what the president-elect says because it's only a game and not important? Now that is an entirely new frontier in American politics.

Orval Faubus once famously said "just because I said it doesn't make it so." But that made it even more important that the media report what he said, for eventual comparison with what turned out not to be so.

On Tuesday morning, a tweet appeared from Trump saying that flag-burning should be a crime punishable by a loss of citizenship or a year in jail.

By the Hendren theory, Trump had applied his genius to get us fixated on something that hadn't much happened lately--the burning of an American flag in protest--while he presumably set about doing something more relevant or substantial to which he didn't want us paying much attention.

Hendren would have us ignore that our imminent president had made a post for worldwide viewing that advocated defying the U.S. Constitution, or at least U.S. Supreme Court case law, in two ways.

One is that the First Amendment assures freedom of expression, a precious clause that, according to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling of 5-to-4 with the late conservative icon Antonin Scalia casting a deciding vote, protects flag-burning. While offensive, burning a flag represented the very kind of political protest the founders sought to protect, the court said. It makes America greater to indulge rather than forbid such protest, the court said.

The other is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1958 that the Constitution forbids exile as punishment for a crime less than treasonous allegiance to another country. Burning a flag is a mere expression of protest, not in itself an act of conspiring with a competing foreign country to do harm to the United States.

"Citizenship is not a license that expires on misbehavior," the court wrote in restoring citizenship rights to a 1944 war deserter who had been dishonorably discharged--which was appropriate as a military penalty, to be distinguished from civilian criminal conduct, the court said.

What if President Barack Obama went on Twitter and said, hey, y'all, I'm fixin' to go out here on the driveway in front of the West Wing and burn an American flag just to prove I can and to protest this horrible presidential choice?

And what if he was doing it tactically to get reporters to fixate on the burning flag and keep off the front page that he had just pardoned a million or so evil people?

Should we ignore the tweet, not to mention a flag in presidentially lit flames? Not fall for the trick?

Or would a sitting president's public burning of his nation's flag amount to ... you know, what was it we once called it ... oh, yeah, news?

For that matter, tweeting by the incoming president to advocate unconstitutional actions is significantly more momentous than would be a lame duck president's constitutional if rather remarkable public spectacle.

There is a prevailing issue here. It is that the greater threat to the republic from Trump's presidency is not policy. We can survive Medicaid block grants and renegotiated trade deals. We could even survive, if significantly less-free, a revisited ruling by a Trump-remade Supreme Court that defied the First Amendment and banned flag-burning.

The greater threat is that this guy is simply not possessed of stability or reasoned restraint.

Whenever he posts on a worldwide news feed a signal of that instability and absence of restraint, we in the media are obliged to take prominent note of it. That's even if we also are taking a chance on being sinisterly played.

A president-elect's words matter. Or at least they once did, and ought to.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 12/01/2016

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