After the Donald Trump reelection campaign featured official governmental business and speeches from the White House grounds during the second night of Republican National Convention, numerous news outlets framed the violation as a "blurring of the lines" between campaigning and governing.
Let's be clear: This isn't a "blurring." It's Trump campaigning on the taxpayer dime, leveraging the symbols of American power that have been entrusted to him in service of maintaining that power.
It's a completely egregious violation of the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits federal employees from participating in political activity while in a government building or while wearing an official uniform or insignia. The president and vice president are exempted from some parts of the law, but not the first lady, who delivered her convention speech in the Rose Garden from a podium bearing the presidential seal. And neither is acting Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf, who administered the Oath of Allegiance during a pre-taped naturalization service at the White House that featured Trump, who was also escorted into the room by U.S. Marines as “Hail to the Chief” played in the background.
“On behalf of everyone here today, I’d like to express my gratitude to you, Mr. President, for hosting this naturalization ceremony here at the White House,” Wolf said.
Legal experts were aghast at the flagrant violation of law. Kathleen Clark, a legal and government ethics professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, told the Washington Post Wolf and Trump were “breathtaking in their contempt for the law.”
Jordan Libowitz, spokesperson for the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), added, “This is so obviously, blatantly, insultingly a Hatch Act violation that it’s starting to seem like the Trump administration is going out of its way to find new ways to violate the law.”
Indeed, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sneered at the criticism. "Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares," Meadows told Politico. "This is a lot of hoopla," he said, "mainly because the convention has been so completely successful."
Naturally, the White House loves this kind of controversy and is plenty happy to rub their norm-busting abuses of power in America’s face. As Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway quipped after she got admonished for numerous Hatch Act violations (including hawking Ivanka Trump products to Fox News viewers while broadcasting from the White House), "Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”
But Trump's leveraging of symbols of the American state as a prop to create the aura of a dynastic hold on power is a dangerous slide toward fascism. As GOP strategist Rick Wilson pointed out on MSNBC, it's a "merger" between the Trump campaign and the federal government.
The White House tried to downplay the breach by sending out an anonymous official to claim the ceremony was simply part of the president’s official schedule and "the campaign decided to use the publicly available content for campaign purposes."
Yet as the Post noted, the White House press corps didn't know about naturalization ceremony nor was it listed on the president’s public schedule.
But this is exactly the kind of controversy the White House wants, and it fits perfectly into their courting of grievance voters. Rather than talking about the 180,000 who have died on Donald Trump's watch and perhaps how more Americans can be spared from the pandemic, Team Trump would much rather be signaling to their base: We can do whatever we want and no one can stop us.
That's exactly the license of privilege Trump supporters live for.
