Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

When Words Lose All Meaning

Jonathan Bernstein's morning links.

February 6, 2018 at 1:58 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

This again?
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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I really don't want to write about Donald Trump's rejection of democratic norms all the time. Plenty of people handle that. And yet, it feels wrong to ignore authoritarian statements by the president of the United States. So here we go again.

On Monday, Trump told a rally in Ohio that Democrats were guilty of treason and were un-American because they didn't applaud him during the State of the Union address. Except he sort of didn't; he was joking, in what Jonathan Chait describes as a "Don Rickles-style riff." National Review's Dan McLaughlin has a theory about it: