Politics' Newest Empty Gesture: The Disavowal - New York Times
Fast-forward to November, when Trump met with Times reporters and the newspaper’s editorial board, and the conversation turned to his top adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, and Bannon’s relation to white nationalism. Trump adopted the pose you assume to get out of a no-win argument: Tell me what to say, and I’ll say it. Asked whether he felt he had stirred up the racism of the so-called alt-right, Trump said: “I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group.” He had to repeat it — this time, “I disavow and condemn” — when the question arose again.
The most striking feature of these denunciations is that an eventual president was asked to make them. The second-most striking is how he made them. He didn’t say, “Jake, I can’t support white supremacy, because it’s terrible.” He didn’t say, “I can’t help it if the K.K.K. loves me, but they’re bad guys, and I don’t want their love.” He didn’t say, “Eww, racism.” Instead, he used a word that made a show without taking a stand. He kept saying “disavow.”
What kind of word is that? It’s common, but not that common. I mean, when was the last time you disavowed anything?
Sometimes “disavow” implies a previous avowal and suggests that something has changed. Sometimes it says: “I used to wear a hood and burn crosses and type the N-word all day from my egg-avatar Twitter account, but not anymore!” Only sometimes, though. “Disavow” is also concisely defined as “to refuse to acknowledge or accept,” not just “to deny responsibility for” or “to sever or disown.” Politically, it can represent a kind of psychological denial: “Whatever is happening here, I refuse to accept that it has anything to do with me.” It’s easy to hear in it a refusal to acknowledge not just the substance of an accusation, but any trace of the accusation itself. “I disavow” sounds like disengagement, but it’s as much the height of disingenuousness as “I endorse.” In the end, it’s mostly just a phrase that seems like the right thing to say when an accusing reporter is asking you to do it. It has a formality that’s self-protectively slippery.
Trump’s “disavow,” after all, is often a verb that refuses an object. Sure, the context confirms that he was talking about white supremacists. But officially, he wasn’t disavowing any particular person, group or concept, not in any meaningful detail. He was making a question go away without having to dirty his hands on it or lose followers with a more emphatic disavowal, and in that sense, he appeared to be doing something truly insidious: nothing. When you are faced with white supremacists, “disavow” is the faintest possible condemnation, distancing you in a manner too weak to be consequential. Racists know their racism isn’t respectable, and Trump seems to know this, too. That makes “disavow” perfect to mollify nagging reporters: You demonstrate your willingness to repudiate racists, but in a way that won’t actually leave racists feeling repudiated.
Trump hasn’t been the only politician to feel the heat. In April 2008, during his candidacy, Barack Obama was forced to sever ties with the pastor Jeremiah Wright, after Wright made another fiery, conspiratorial speech that scared the white electorate. “When I say I find his comments appalling, I mean it,” Obama said at a news conference in Winston-Salem, N.C. “Anybody who has worked with me, who knows my life, who has read my books, who has seen what this campaign is about will understand it is completely opposed to what I stand for and where I want to take this country.” Obama offered more than a plain-old disavowal. He threw Wright down an elevator shaft.
In August, when Reince Priebus was still chairman of the Republican National Committee, he demanded that Hillary Clinton rebuke Obama for a $400 million payment made to Iran that, following the release of American prisoners in Tehran, Priebus said, looked a lot like a ransom. “Hillary Clinton must immediately disavow this dangerous blunder or risk putting more Americans in jeopardy,” read Priebus’s statement.
Republicans, meanwhile, were forced to keep dancing around their own candidate’s words, behavior and affiliations. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, spent months trying to keep some sliver of daylight between himself and the candidate. The Atlantic pressed Mitt Romney to disavow Trump’s birtherism in 2012, but even his vociferous criticism of Trump this election cycle never reached full disavowal. If it had, Trump’s subsequent parading him around as part of his secretary-of-state pageant would only have heightened the appearance of hypocrisy. It’s an impossible, damnable bind in which to place yourself, supporting the party candidate and yet disavowing so many of the individual things he says and does. That was campaign politics in 2016: A failure to disavow was not always so different from an endorsement.
The Trump campaign has become the mother ship of disavowals. When his former butler called for Obama’s assassination in May, Trump even had to disavow that. “Tony Senecal has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for years, but nevertheless we totally and completely disavow the horrible statements made by him regarding the president,” the campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said. And before half a dozen concerned former contestants from “The Apprentice” held an anti-Trump news conference last April, The Daily News ran a headline that said: “Six Ex-‘Apprentice’ Stars to Disavow Donald Trump.”
“Disavow” is for when you clearly stand to benefit from an association with someone or something but can deny any responsibility for that association. If you relate to that usage, perhaps you’re in the spy business, where it’s practically in the handbook. How many “Mission: Impossible” TV assignments began with a recorded voice laying out a particular job, then adding that famous caveat: “As always, should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This tape/disc will self-destruct in five seconds”? In that world, we disavow people when the work they’re doing is too dirty for us to stand by — when it benefits us but we can’t endorse its methods.
The spy novelist John le Carré knows about the cold, insidious nature of “disavow.” With him, spies are meant for leaving in the cold, and “disavow” is a bureaucrat’s divorce. But in “The Constant Gardener,” his 2001 novel about a British diplomat in Kenya, Le Carré creates an alternative shading of the word: “The national flag will be flying in the garden, the sprinklers will be turned off, the red carpet will be laid out, black servants in white gloves will be hovering, just as they did in the colonial times we all piously disavow.” Something in this sentence gets at the obligatory morality of the word — washing your hands of a wrong like colonialism, despite still basking in its every last detail.
“Piously disavow” is just a beautiful combination of words, too. Until recently, it might have seemed redundant: What disavowal isn’t pious, or at least indignant? But our current political environment keeps reminding us that a disavowal can also be something else: perfunctory, meaningless, phony. This is a moment that rewards false umbrage, strategic dismay and righteous disdain, conflating it with true outrage. We’re up to our necks in winking disavowals. Who will work up the nerve to disavow that?
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