Sessions’ lecture on speech applies to Oval Office too

By Frank Bruni

Friday, Sept. 29, 2017 | 2 a.m.

I’m thrilled that Jeff Sessions is such an evangelist for free speech.

Now if only he could convert his boss.

On Tuesday afternoon, with much fanfare, Sessions strode onto a stage at Georgetown University and decried the rise of a creature with an insatiable appetite for affirmation, a distressing inability to respect the other side and an ugly impulse to silence anyone who dwells there. He meant today’s college student. He could have been describing today’s president.

While decency and decorum are dying in this administration, irony and hypocrisy thrive: Sessions’ defense of the First Amendment came just days after Donald Trump needlessly went to war against professional athletes who were exercising the very rights it protects. When pressed on this dissonance in a question-and-answer period after his remarks, Sessions simply refused to recognize it. He fell unswervingly in line with Trump, contradictions be damned. To serve in this administration is a transcendently speech-freeing thing.

There’s no dispute that many campuses are illiberal enclaves of bluntly enforced groupthink, and there’s no doubt that many students deserve the stern words that Sessions aimed at them. But they’re still green and still growing. What’s Trump’s excuse?

Given his office and capacity for destruction, he needs the lecture that Sessions delivered most of all. So let’s redirect it from its intended audience to its ideal one, from the ivory tower to Trump Tower, and look at Sessions’ remarks through the prism of his ruler.

“There are those who will say that certain speech isn’t deserving of protection. They will say that some speech is hurtful — even hateful … But the right of free speech does not exist only to protect the ideas upon which most of us agree.”

Bull’s-eye, bingo and hallelujah. The right of free speech protects whatever Colin Kaepernick has to say and whatever he intended to communicate by kneeling during the national anthem. Trump may not be fond of that particular gesture. I myself never was. And as Sessions correctly noted, the president is free to make those thoughts known.

But he went so much further, exhorting team owners in the National Football League to fire players who didn’t listen to the anthem and salute the flag in the manner that Trump would like. The First Amendment says that the government mustn’t prohibit free expression, and his campaign against pro athletes, threatening them with the loss of their livelihoods, edges up to that territory.

“As Justice Robert Jackson once explained, ‘If there is a fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.’”

Our highest official is also our pettiest, and his attack on athletes smacks of such an attempted prescription. So did the statement of his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that the ESPN host Jemele Hill’s characterization of the president as a “white supremacist” constituted a “fire-able offense.” That’s between ESPN and Hill. The government — meaning the White House — shouldn’t be getting involved.

And Trump’s onetime suggestion that flag burning be made a crime: How does that square with the Constitution’s fixed star?

“A shelter for fragile egos.”

That’s how Sessions portrayed the college campus. Make “egos” singular and the phrase defines the Oval Office now.

This president has such an overweening investment in his own glory, or rather in the illusion of it, that he distorts truth (the size of his inauguration crowd) and invents facts (the voter fraud that supposedly gave Hillary Clinton the popular vote) to sustain it.

As news organizations call him out on these and all of his other lies, he doesn’t merely push back at the stories one by one. He tweets and bleats that the media is an “enemy of the American people,” trafficking in “fake news.” He tries to intimidate given reporters and news organizations.

He has called for changes in the law to make it easier to sue news organizations for libel. At rallies, he has encouraged crowds to rant at reporters. On Twitter, he has shared violent imagery in regard to CNN.

No president in my lifetime has so thoroughly rejected the media’s role as a vital pillar of democracy and so assertively sought to discredit it as an institution.

Freedom of the press is mentioned snug alongside freedom of speech in Sessions’ beloved First Amendment, but you’d never know it from Trump’s behavior.

“The university is supposed to be the place where we train virtuous citizens.”

The White House is supposed to be the place to which we elevate the most virtuous ones of all, at least in happy theory.

But can you show me the honor in a president who warps reality itself to his advantage and savages all who get in the way? And where in that ruthlessness is respect for the lofty principles that Sessions so disingenuously espoused?

Administration, heal thyself.

George Will is a columnist for The Washington Post.