WaPo's Greg Sargent attempts some impressive feats of intellectual acrobatics to defend Nancy Pelosi's SOTU-shredding tantrum

Sarah D | 12:58 PM on February 05, 2020

Nancy Pelosi made a spectacular ass of herself ripping up Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address (an address she invited him to deliver, by the way). But according to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, even if Pelosi’s gesture constitutes a breach of decorum — and he’s not sure if it does — it’s nothing compared to what Donald Trump has done to our country. To our democracy:

Opinion: Pelosi ripped up a speech.

Trump is ripping up our democracy. https://t.co/CSicSWek2m

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 5, 2020

Sargent explains:

But there’s a more precise point to be made here. If the underlying premise of the criticism of breaches of decorum is that they pose a threat to our democracy’s functioning, then much of what Trump has done well beyond such breaches — for three years now — actually does pose a severe threat to that functioning, while acts like Pelosi’s actually do not pose any remotely comparable threat.

This isn’t whataboutism. It’s meant to correct a massive category error. Breaches in civility are not the main threat to our political system. Indeed, if Trump only went on half-cocked rally rants and merely insulted Democrats, the current damage would not be nearly as severe.

It’s all the other misconduct that threatens the fabric of democracy — Trump’s unchecked lawlessness, his abuses of power, his public racism, his unprecedented lying, his treatment of the opposition as illegitimate.

In this context, hand-wringing about a mutual deterioration of decorum — the New York Times discerned a “mutual snubbing,” while an NBC reporter sniffed that Pelosi indulged in “antics” that are “Trumpian” — is profoundly misleading about the wildly asymmetrical realities of the moment.