The Beautiful Fantasy of Silent Don

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Suppose that Donald Trump were to keep his mouth shut.Seriously.Try to imagine the Trump presidency in a world in which Trump himself went silent. I don’t just mean a world in which he stopped using Twitter (as more than two-thirds of voters think he should); I mean a world in which he chose as his model President Calvin Coolidge. Not the real Coolidge, mind you, who actually had a great deal to say, but the mythical Coolidge, the one who hardly uttered a sentence, the one who was the subject of the false though famous story in which a woman sat next to him at dinner and said, “Mr. President, I made a bet that I could get more than two words out of you tonight,” and Coolidge replied, “You lose.”Picture that Trump. Let’s call him Silent Don. What would his presidency be like? For one thing, there would be no offhand comments about how Russia maybe didn’t do it, no moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and those protesting the neo-Nazis, no sophomoric attacks on Hillary Clinton long after the election is over, no screeds about the Justice Department or the Federal Reserve or fake news or the hundred other topics that might without warning be the subject of the latest ill-considered blast from Trumpworld.Silent Don would still give speeches — not off the cuff, but carefully crafted. He would stick to the text. He wouldn’t have his staff constantly running around trying to clean up his messes. No doubt he would face the occasional news conference, but rather than holding them at his present rate of 1.7 per month (the same as Barack Obama), he’d meet the news media about as often as Ronald Reagan — who averaged fewer than six a year, the lowest rate of any president over the past century. And at those oh-so-rare news conferences, too, Silent Don would stick to his script.So let’s imagine Silent Don in the White House. What would be different?For one thing, the Resistance would have less raw meat on which to feast. I don’t mean that the anti-Trump forces would collapse. I imagine they’d still be strong and eager. But without his utterances and tweets to focus on, the Resistance case would be more abstract, an assault less on Trumpism than on conservatism more generally. I’m not saying that Silent Don would not still turn many people’s stomachs. I am saying that if he were the president, the Resistance would have tougher sledding, because he wouldn’t be providing a daily dose of outrage.Another difference would be that we’d have to judge Silent Don on the basis of his policies, not his words, and not the constant mad whirl of Trumpworld. This actually would be a good thing. We’d be judging a presidency not by what the incumbent says but by what the incumbent does — an attractively democratic approach that @realDonaldTrump makes all but impossible. Try to picture cable news commentators who spend their time debating the right way to handle the economy or the environment than arguing over whether the president’s latest gaffe proves he’s a stooge of Vladimir Putin.Speaking of which, if Silent Don were in the Oval Office, there would be a lot less speculation about what the Russians have on him — and what speculation exists would probably exist further from the mainstream. Very likely there would be no investigation by an independent counsel, either, because Silent Don would never have met alone with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the first place. I’m not suggesting that there would be no scandal or corruption in Silent Don’s administration — only that in the absence of nonstop presidential braggadocio, these would be the focus of smaller chunks of popular attention.You might object, of course, that Silent Don could never have won the election. You might be right. Trump himself has said that without Twitter, he would have lost. And the crowds who cheered his anything-but-politically-correct harangues would have had less to cheer. On the other hand, if you think elections are determined not by the qualities of the candidates but by vast historical forces (or, for that matter, the state of the economy), then Silent Don might still have prevailed. The difference is, he’d have done it without — to take just the most prominent example — launching a sickening verbal assault on a Muslim family whose son, a U.S. Army captain, died heroically in Iraq.By definition, Silent Don would have been a significantly better president than the nonsilent incumbent. That’s because even if you disliked Trump’s policies intensely, it’s a lot more troubling to dislike intensely both his policies and his words.In fact, that distinction suggests the biggest difference. Were Silent Don in the White House, the nation might be less infected by the shared, stressful addiction to oh-no-what-did-he-say-today-I-shouldn’t-care-but-I-can’t-help-it-I-think-I’d-better-check-and-see-and-oh-no-oh-blankety-blankety-blank-blank-it’s-worse-than-I-thought-I-can’t-believe-this-man-is-in-the-Oval-Office-what-the-blank-are-we-going-to-do? We don’t really live in a calm age, but were Silent Don the president, we might be just a little bit calmer.In theory, the Trump we have could still metamorphose into Silent Don. In practice, however, we know such a transformation will never happen. Even if it did, nobody would believe the change was real. We’ve been drawn a little too far into the maelstrom to accept peace and quiet as anything but an illusion.Unless, of course, the change lasted. If we were to get Silent Don for a year or more, people might begin to accept him. (Or maybe not.)Anyway, it’s all just a fantasy. Still, I confess that I feel a little better — a little calmer — just imagining Silent Don in the White House. So what I think I’ll do, along the way, is check in with him now and then. Maybe if we’re persistent, Silent Don will even give us an interview.In which case I promise to get more than two words out of him.I’ll let you know how it goes.To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels include “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” and his nonfiction includes “Civility.”©2018 Bloomberg L.P.-->

The Beautiful Fantasy of Silent Don

The Beautiful Fantasy of Silent Don

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The Beautiful Fantasy of Silent Don