Donald J. Trump–who most recently broke a streak lasting since Calvin Coolidge embarrassed himself in the same way in 1926, by getting a handpicked committee to agree to put his face on a coin–today issued an executive order purporting to enforce something else that is newly minted: “the policy of the United States that no college football game, specifically college football’s CFP or other postseason games, be broadcast in a manner that directly conflicts with the Army‑Navy Game.”
A locution that pretends that statements issued by only one branch of the federal government are “the policy of the United States,” especially when the policy is strictly domestic in scope and more properly the province of the legislative branch, is disturbing. It is also, I fear, all too common. It’s a bad habit and one that predates Trump–although, as always, Trump takes our bad tendencies and wallows in them, like a pig in slop, until they’re different in kind as well as degree. Part of our return to sanity will entail Americans becoming more comfortable, not with using or rejecting the phrase “not my president” according to who is in office, but with treating all presidents as holders of an important but limited office that is not the United States incarnate. Its occupants are individuals who demand no awe or obeisance, who wield power but hold no greater share of sovereignty than any other citizen, and who should be spanked when they become naughty or arrogant. America will be a saner, safer, and more healthily democratic place when we reject the abomination of gold coins and fascistic banners bearing a living president, but also forgo the lesser (because unofficial) but still genuine democratic sin of papering the walls with Sheppard Fairey posters.
The executive order itself, as is often the case, is of course milder in fact than it is in Trump’s fantasies of one-man rule. It directs the Secretary of Commerce and the chair of the FCC to “coordinate” with various other players “with the goal of establishing an exclusive window for the Army-Navy Game, during which no other college football game is broadcast.” The problem with this is not simply that the policy is unnecessary. Nor is it simply the silliness of asserting that having to DVR a game because of a scheduling conflict, or to move one’s head two inches in a sports bar to behold a second screen, “detract[s] from a morale-building event of vital interest to the Department of War [sic]” in a way that demands intrusive presidential action. Nor, problem though it may be, is it simply that a president in a nation that is currently at (undeclared) war is so much a creature of impulse and solipsism that he cannot manage to concentrate on issues that actually, and urgently, are of vital interest to the national defense.
I would point to two additional problems. One is that the president is at best unclear about the fact that he has limited powers without Congress, that he must perforce issue limited and aspirational orders like this one, and that he really has no business at all dictating a national American culture, let alone one modeled after his own unspeakably vulgar and pedestrian tastes. (Bear in mind that we still face a possible successor regime under J.D. Vance that would like to do the same thing, only with more blasphemy prosecutions and vague citations to Salic law.) When his executive orders are more modest than his descriptions of them, it may have less to do with his congenital dishonesty, or with presidents’ customary love of exaggeration, and more to do with a genuine belief that his wishes are law, and that text and execution are mere details.
Take Trump’s speech today presenting the Commander in Chief Trophy to Navy, in which, among other divagations–as always, his tight 30-minute set left ample time for Trump to honor himself–he announced the new order. There’s no business about coordinating here: just a flat statement that “I’m going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December is preserved exclusively” for the Army-Navy game and that “nobody else is going to be allowed” to play football during that game. It’s nice, I suppose, that he adds that “if you don’t want to watch football, you don’t have to,” even if it undermines the justification for the policy itself. But “if you want to watch football, you’re only watching one game.”
I like college football, but how it’s scheduled is of little interest to me. It is important to me that Americans, who pretend to reject monarchism and to favor freedom of choice, are in the grips of a regime that wants a dictated national culture. And it matters too that the president, whose speech again brings up the dreaded autopen but whose acquaintance with what he actually signs seems to be mostly of the nodding variety, thinks he can dictate that and has done it through the order.
The second problem is that, given the nature of his regime, he’s not so wrong about that. His order does not depend on the notion that the CFP, NCAA, and “the playoffs’ broadcast and media rights partners” will happily “coordinate” around this issue and arrive at the answer he wants. It depends on the threat that they had better, if they know what’s good for them. More specifically in this case, it depends on his knowledge that FCC chairman Brendan Carr will gladly threaten licenses and mergers to “serve”–or, possibly, flatter and pacify–his president.
Months ago I wrote, and of course I was hardly the first, that the present regime resembles a “semi-organized criminal enterprise, albeit with two key differences: In a well-run mob, the capos are able men who have guts, and the don is capable of occasional dignity, foresight, and good taste.” In such a regime, enforcement officials don’t even get to aspire to the status of Roy Cohn. Carr–along with Pam Bondi and many others–gets to play one role and one only: he’s Luca Brasi.