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Jonn Dingell Is The Trump-Twitter Destroyer America Needs

Jonn Dingell Is The Trump-Twitter Destroyer America Needs

This article originally appeared in USA Today.

Since 1966, the news media have granted the opposition party a national platform to deliver a response to the president’s annual State of the Union Address. This attempt to balance our debate must be upgraded for the 21st century, now that we have a new president who tweets like a moody teenager who was just denied a participation award. Democrats should name a Twitter account to issue official responses to President Trump’s tweets, and those rebuttals should be noted in any relevant reporting.

There’s one tweeter who has best demonstrated the character and the 140 characters necessary to perform this role. The best way to stop an unstable 70-year-old with an itchy Twitter finger is the world’s greatest 90-year-old Twitter user — @JohnDingell, a former Democratic representative from Michigan.

While still serving in Congress as a spry 88-year-old in 2014, John Dingell was recognized by BuzzFeed as “probably the best person on Twitter” after an errant tweet from an Environmental Protection Agency account led him to tweeting about the shock of learning what a “Kardashian” is. Since then, he has retired from the House as the longest serving member of Congress in U.S. history and gone on to successfully defend his title of “tweet king” — as Politico Playbook recently called him — with reliable barbs focused on politics, Michigan sports, and Donald Trump.

“Forget the basket,” Dingell  tweeted during Trump’s transition. “The truly deplorable ones end up in the Cabinet.”

When The New York Times reported that Trump aides couldn’t operate the light switches at the White House, Dingell tweeted, “Luckly for them, setting the Constitution on fire provides at least a bit of working light.” As for the fake-news inaugural furor, Dingell tweeted: “If you think lying about a crowd size is bad, wait until you hear about their plan to kick 30,000,000 people off their health care coverage.”

America might have faced periods of greater discord, strife and division, but our public debate has never been so abrasive, typo-ridden, and pissy. And much, if not most, of the thanks for our degenerating discourse belongs to the more than 34,000 tweets of the new president of the United States.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 64 percent of Americans — including 45 percent of Republicans — believe that Trump should give up his personal Twitter account. But given the president’s unwillingness to release his taxes, divest from his businesses or even read a Dummiesguide to the Constitution, Democrats can’t wait around and expect Trump to moderate his behavior on his own.

You could argue that the left would be better served if its official digital response came from a somewhat younger voice from one of the communities most likely to bear the brunt of Trump’s attacks on reproductive health care, immigration, and voting rights. But institutions are all that Americans can rely on now to protect us from Trump’s sleep-starved, anti-democratic impulses.

And John Dingell is an institution.

On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was working as a page on the floor of the House of Representatives. First elected in 1955, he presided over the House in 1965 when Medicare passed and was there in 2010 when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Dingell was one of the last two World War II veterans left in Congress when he retired after his 30th term in 2014.

Most important, Dingell doesn’t ever have to worry about getting a job again. This gives him a freedom to swing back at Trump’s wild accusations, proclamations and ejaculations.

Plus, he — like the president — seems to have a fair amount of spare time.

I visited Dingell’s home in Dearborn and found him still filled with reverence for the presidential office that he says “our Founding Fathers and members of Congress regarded as almost mystical in its qualities.” But that reverence is not extended to the man who now holds it, whom he finds to be “a bully and a blowhard and a liar.”

Dingell doesn’t want Trump to fail because “if he’s not a success, everything goes to hell. I want to see him succeed in a proper way.”

What would a proper success look like?

“He is the president of all Americans. It is his duty to look to the well-being of all parts of the county. We’ve not yet seen whether he is doing that, whether he intends to do that, or whether he will do that.”

In fact, Dingell’s seeing the opposite.

“Whether you’re talking about Roosevelt, Hoover, or Trump, they have a responsibility to preserve the dignity of the office. I don’t see him doing that so far.”

His advice to the new tweeter in chief?

“Be careful. He has a responsibility for the economy, the jobs, the futures, the hopes, the dreams of 330 million Americans.”

As a man born between the two world wars and a student of history, Dingell has a staggering sense of the perils of Trump’s bombast.

“If you look, a bunch of big-mouthed European potentates got us into World War I. Do you remember what happened in August of 1914? Read that history. It’s terrifying.”

Many on the right have attempted to reframe Trump’s Twitter usage as a modern update of Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats that soothed a nation transitioning from the worst Depression in American economic history to the deadliest war ever. Dingell’s not buying it.

“I listened to the fireside chats as a boy, and they were received reverentially by the American people. You can’t say his tweets are received reverentially. You can’t say mine are, either. You sure as hell shouldn’t,” Dingell said, displaying a self-awareness that is now not allowed within several hundred feet of the White House.

Are there any checks and balances on the Twitter use of a former U.S. congressman?

“John Dingell unfiltered is a little dangerous,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, 63, who succeeded her husband and must still run for re-election, told me. “We encourage him to run (his thoughts) by us before they get posted.”

“And I usually do,” Mr. Dingell assured me.

He recognizes that Twitter offers everyone “a chance to make an ass of himself publicly.” He compares putting that power in the undersized hands of the president to giving “a gun to a kid” without any safety training. But his worries extend far beyond Trump’s Twitter use.

“He is a man who has two problems that work against each other. One is ego. He has a gigantic ego. And he has a gigantic inferiority complex,” Dingell told me. “And he’s playing into the hands of his enemies. But he’s also playing into the hands of our enemies in the nation, which is why people in that kind of office are so careful about what they say. And he’s not. And all of these things are going to come back.”

Seven decades in public service have left John Dingell with some optimism that even Trump could rise to the stature of his office.

“He still has time. And you should watch this to see that he doesn’t jeopardize our leadership position in the world.”

But that hope is only discouraged by the new president’s conduct.

After Trump fired his acting attorney general for refusing to defend his immigration ban, Dingell tweeted, “Comparisons to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre are a bit misguided, in that Nixon at least had a general idea of what the hell he was doing.”

That’s the kind of context every American needs.

Trump The Twitter Troll Goes On A Roll

Trump The Twitter Troll Goes On A Roll

It’s Donald Trump vs. the World — and the fight is live on Twitter.

It began on Thursday, after Senator John McCain (R-AZ) denounced Trump for having “fired up the crazies.” Trump shot right back by calling for McCain’s defeat in his Senate seat next year — and also attacked the former Republican presidential nominee’s military record, as a student at the Naval Academy.

That one spurred condemnations from across the political spectrum — most notably from former congressman John Dingell (D-MI), a veteran of World War II.

Trump dug in Friday morning against the backlash, however, quoting a tweet from someone else in praise of his McCain trash talk.

Trump’s other big fight was with Rick Perry, who has already publicly taken on The Donald. On Thursday, Perry released a statement saying in part:

I have a message for my fellow Republicans and the independents who will be voting in the primary process: what Mr. Trump is offering is not conservatism, it is Trump-ism – a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense.

America doesn’t need another president who pays lip service when issues of national security are at stake. America doesn’t need another president who will pass the buck on border security. We need a president who will finally act to secure the border after decades of failed leadership in Washington, D.C. And Mr. Trump has done nothing to prove that he is the president America needs.

Cue the response by Trump, with a dig at Perry’s intelligence — an obvious sore point for the candidate who had the infamous “Oops” moment the last time he ran:

Well, that debate sure is going to be fun.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

John Dingell, Longest Serving U.S. Representative, To Retire

John Dingell, Longest Serving U.S. Representative, To Retire

By Todd Spangler, Stephen Henderson and Kathleen Gray, Detroit Free Press

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who replaced his father in the House some 58 years ago and became one of the most powerful members of Congress ever, will step down after this year, capping a career umatched in its longevity and singular in its influence and sweep.

Dingell, 87, told the Detroit Free Press that he’d reached the decision to retire at the end of his current term — his 29th full one — rather than run for re-election because it was time, given a list of achievements that any other member of Congress would envy, and his continued frustration over partisan gridlock.

It comes at a time when many members of both parties are moving toward the exits in both the House and Senate. Michigan is not only losing Dingell but U.S. Senator Carl Levin, a widely respected Democrat with 35 years’ experience, who announced his retirement last year.

For weeks, rumors had circulated that Dingell — who last June surpassed the late U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia as the longest-serving member of Congress ever — might be considering retirement. While clearly sharp mentally — he could be seen in recent months peppering witnesses with questions before his beloved Energy and Commerce Committee — time has taken its toll on his body, forcing him to use crutches or a wheelchair to get around.

But less than two weeks ago, his office seemed to put those rumors to rest with an e-mail to constituents in which Dingell vowed to fight on for extended unemployment benefits and “to protect the many workers and industries important to southeast Michigan.” In the e-mail, he said he would “continue to reiterate to my colleagues that the words ‘compromise’ and ‘conciliation’ should not be considered dirty words in Washington.”

Dingell was expected to let his staff know about the decision Monday morning and then announce it publicly at a noon luncheon at the Southern Wayne County Chamber of Commerce in Southgate, Michigan. Speculation will begin almost immediately about a successor.

Dingell’s wife, Deborah, who with her husband makes up one of Washington’s most prominent power couples, is widely considered a possible candidate; there has also been speculation that state Senator Rebekah Warren of Ann Arbor could test the waters. It is considered a relatively safe Democratic district.

Whoever replaces Dingell, she or he will have a tough act to follow.

John David Dingell Jr. was 29 years old when the Detroit native was elected in a 1955 special election to serve out the remainder of his late father’s term. Since then, he has cast tens of thousands of votes and helped pass — if not write — the most iconic pieces of legislation of the last six decades, from the Civil Rights Act and Medicare to the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and, in 2010, the Affordable Care Act.

The man known throughout Washington as Big John — at 6-foot-3, he literally towered over witnesses before the House Energy and Commerce Committee — Dingell cut a distinctive figure in the Capitol. A progressive when it came to workers’ rights, he is also a staunch defender of Michigan industries, including its automakers, and at times ran afoul of environmentalists.

He also supported gun rights, and, as an avid outdoorsman, sat on the board of the National Rifle Association for a time, though he eventually quit. He counts as among his most important accomplishments the creation of the Detroit International Wildlife Refuge and the River Raisin Battlefield.

Gentlemanly and erudite, Dingell has always positioned himself as a centrist when it comes to getting legislation passed, looking for members on both sides of the political aisle to count on as allies. Dingell has decried the partisan atmosphere that has grown toxic in Washington, but he has managed to maintain friendships across the aisle, including with the current Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, U.S. Representative Fred Upton (R-MI).

Dingell still likes referring to himself as “just a dumb Polish lawyer,” but his career has helped shape the way legislation is passed in Washington. He vastly expanded the scope of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s purview during his first stint as chairman, which lasted from 1981 to 1995, to the point where it was said it handled four out of every 10 bills in the House.

He used to have a photo of the earth from space behind his desk and when anyone asked him to define the committee’s jurisdiction, he’d point to it.

Dingell also became famous — or infamous, as the case may have been — among Washington bureaucrats, industrialists and others who came before his committees for oversight matters. He investigated the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and oversaw the breakup of AT&T, and his letters to agency officials — demanding specific answers to questions in a tight time frame — grew legendary as “Dingell-grams.”

Many felt Dingell might resign sometime after the 2008 election when, fresh off a knee surgery, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California — a key ally of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — took on Dingell for the Energy and Commerce chairmanship and won. But Dingell continued to work with Waxman to pass the ACA and has remained chairman emeritus and sat on all subcommittees.

Waxman, who had remained the ranking Democrat on the committee after Republicans took control of the House in 2011, announced his retirement from Congress in the last few weeks as well. With Waxman stepping down, there had been some speculation that Dingell might again ask his party to return him to the ranking member’s seat.

With Dingell’s departure at the end of the current term in early January, the longest-serving active member of Congress will be U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-MI), who once worked for Dingell and has been in the House since 1965.

Conyers, 84, would need 10 more years to match Dingell’s record for longevity.

Photo: Center For American Progress via Flickr