Targeting Trump's Helpers: Rabies Policy Is Out of Control

We are buried under a tsunami of toxicity.

Too many people justify bad behavior by denouncing the actions of the Trump administration – and many of them are crying foul if people on their side have suffered the same mistreatment.

As I learned when I slammed the refusal of a Virginia restaurant to serve Sarah Sanders during the weekend, there is a lot of anger and even hate there, and In the era of social media, it explodes immediately. The contention seems to have melted since President Trump's policy of separating families at the border, which he has since overthrown, has come to dominate news coverage.

Maxine Waters, a member of the Democratic Left Congress, threw oil on the fire and basically called on the Liberals to take Trump Cabinet members in their lives. It seems irresponsible to me, and it does not even use coded language.

"They will not be able to go to a restaurant, they will not be able to stop at a gas station, they will not be able to shop at a department store," Waters said. "People will turn to them, they will protest, they will absolutely harass them."

That's right – a congressman asked that government officials be harassed. It's not hard to imagine someone being hurt, or worse, in the process. How is it not a step towards the rule of the populace?

Still, it's not hard to imagine Waters and his allies spewing indignation whether Eric Holder or Valerie Jarrett or David Axelrod had been denied service or personally harassed by Obama-haters.

When the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia asked Sanders and her friends to leave simply because she works for the White House, CNN staffer Ana Navarro said, "You make choices in life to this cruel and deceptive administration. "

And MSNBC contributor and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that it is "natural and appropriate for decent human beings to shame and avoid practitioners" of Trump's immigration policy .

Trump jumped into the fray yesterday, tweeting: "The Red Hen restaurant should focus more on cleaning its canopies, doors and windows (needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a good no one like Sarah Huckabee Sanders – rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it's dirty inside! "

The president has also denigrated the front of immigration, even as the media focus on efforts to reunite more than 2,000 migrant children scattered across the country with their parents.

"We can not allow all these people to invade our country," tweeted Trump. "When someone enters, we must immediately, without judges or trial, bring them back from where they came from."

In other words, the president proposes to get rid of the main protections of the procedure, which would run up against a number of Supreme Court decisions. But I doubt that he really believes he can do it. Having been on the defensive about family separations, I think he's trying to get the Liberals to overreact and paint them as sweet people on illegal immigration for the medium-term .

Yet, it's one thing to be fighting over politics, and reports of children being held in cages has made this battle perhaps the most moving battle between Trump and his detractors in the political and media worlds . It is another to use the doctrine of the red hen and discriminate officials in their personal lives.

By the way, D.C., Seattle and the Virgin Islands have laws against denial of service to people based on their political affiliation or ideology. And while the Supreme Court ruled this month in favor of a baker who invoked religious beliefs in refusing to provide food for a same-sex marriage, the decision was about the narrow motives of how a Colorado Civil Rights Panel processed the application.

The Sanders incident is barely unique. Shouting protesters gathered in front of Kirstjen Nielsen's townhouse row house, and also forced her to leave a Mexican restaurant prematurely. White House assistant Stephen Miller was confronted and called a "fascist" in another restaurant. Local protesters shouted at Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a movie screening – ironically, a Rogers documentary – and she had to be escorted.

It's getting out of control.

Here is, in a word, the debate between the right and the left.

David Harasanyi in The Federalist:

"You're not a budding MLK, no matter what you think of Trump, you're still an unbearable a-h-le. You are a member of a tribalist, a masked crowd, imbued with a false sense of certainty that allows you [to] justify incivility. That's to say that you are like a real Twitter troll rendered. "

Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, says we can disagree "when it comes to demonstrations, mean words, civil disobedience, boycotts, public evasion". But, he says, "these are quite legitimate tools for political action, civic action, many calls for civility are simply calls for the unilateral disarmament of those who protest against injustices and wrongs. abuse of power ".

There is nothing wrong with the American protest of the old gold. But what is happening right now is slipping on a slippery slope to harassment, denial of service, and abusive behavior. It's pretty telling that this explodes during Donald Trump's presidency – when some in the media and politics are justifying themselves that it's fine to use different standards against him.