The president’s job is presiding. The job description is tucked into the title. Preside. We did not choose to call our executive “His Highness,” or “Caesar,” but “Mr. President.”
Even if we construe “preside” in the bluntest manner — if we say “preside” means “to run the show” — then we’re still confronted by this: To run the show is not to be the show.
If your job is presiding over a government by the people, you should not breed hostility among them. And yet our president continually chooses division and turns himself into the show. I'll concede that his ideological opposites can take offense where none is given, but even with that concession it's astounding how committed to discord he is.
The president’s retweet of Rep. Ilhan Omar's “Some people did something” statement — accompanied by news footage of 9/11 — can be fairly characterized as calculated to spread ill will.
Yes, President Trump meant to signal his indignation. Yes, the statement by itself is minimizing. But Trump cannot have been unaware that in promoting the meme he was breeding hostility. Period.
Our president lacks the charity to assume, in public, that Omar objects to mass murder. That is how uncharitable and self-serving he is.
Matthew Ivan Bennett, Midvale
