The concept of a “norm violation” didn’t begin with Donald Trump, but the phrase’s ubiquity in political discourse is certainly tied to the incoming president.
The term has been used to describe everything from President Barack Obama instituting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in response to congressional gridlock to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, took a pass at the concept for his politics newsletter, Tusk. He spoke with Colorado Matters about what he’s seeing in his research, what it might mean for politics and what’s ahead for America’s political status quo.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Tom Hesse: I feel like if I were playing politics jargon bingo at any point in the last decade, the phrase ‘norm violations’ would probably have been on my bingo card. How did you decide to start looking into this and how does this intersect with your work more broadly?
Seth Masket: That's a good question. So right now I'm working on a book on the modern Republican party, and I'm trying to understand both how it's changed in recent years and how it's become more different from the Democratic party. So I'm looking for ways in which it's different from the other party and also different from itself just a few years ago. And so I'm looking for all sorts of different ways to just measure party behavior. And as you mentioned, one thing that's gotten a fair amount of media attention is what we call norm violations. And all a norm violation is, basically, when a party or an individual does something that really hasn't been done before or is only rarely done.
It usually doesn't mean something that's illegal. It's just a big departure from existing practices. We have a pretty old constitution. We have a constitution that's fairly vague and short. That means that a lot of things just get done simply by tradition, by respect for those traditions. And people come to rely on that. People come to expect, this is simply how the government will operate and they know to work things that way. And when there's violations of that, that can cause a lot of unpredictability. It can cause a lot of instability. So just protecting that, that's what norms are.
Hesse: You mentioned in your piece that norms and violating norms isn't necessarily always a bad thing. I think it sounds sort of bad immediately. People think to recent versions of this: fired FBI directors, things of that sort. But that's not always the case,
Masket: Right. A norm isn't necessarily good. So there's an existing norm in the Senate that allows the filibuster. Filibuster doesn't appear in the Constitution. It's just a tradition in the Senate. That doesn't automatically mean it's good. Obviously some people defend it, but it's not obviously a more democratic thing or anything like that. White supremacy was a norm in this country for a very long time — that wasn't good. Some norms, we welcome their end and we really should. When we're looking at this, we should be considering the quality and the character of a norm, not just whether there was a violation.
Hesse: And I should note this appeared in your Substack newsletter, Tusk. How did you approach this exercise?
Masket: Honestly, it was a pretty simple way of doing this. I wanted basically one relatively right-leaning publication and one relatively left-leaning publication. So I selected from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and I simply did an electronic search of their text going back to 2010 to see whether the term ‘norm violate’ or ‘norm violation’ appears in the text of stories. In some ways, that's a pretty dumb, simple way to do it, and I hope to have a more sophisticated one going forward. But that actually revealed a fair amount. I dug up roughly 60 violations going back to 2010, and interestingly, a lot more of them were Republican than Democratic. So this dug up 43 Republican violations compared to 16 Democratic violations.
And some of these are very minor, some of these are very major, but one of the main points here is that a lot of those violations are very tied to Donald Trump. Either Trump is doing something or Republicans are defending Trump in some way, or Democrats are reacting to a thing Trump did. You don't see this come up a lot prior to 2016, and that doesn't mean there weren't norm violations back then, it's just we were often referring to them in different ways. We were talking about it with terms like ‘hardball’ or ‘brinksmanship’ or something like that. The government shutdown in 2013 doesn't show up in this, so I clearly need to do some tweaking of this, but it's kind of revealing so far.
Hesse: And did you get the sense there’s maybe more of a focus on this in light of Trump's first presidency and then certainly going into his next one?
Masket: There was definitely a focus on this, and in part, this was a result of political observers, journalists, scholars watching Trump's behavior early in his first term in his presidency, knowing that something is different, something has really changed and trying to describe this in a way that captures how different his presidency was from previous presidencies, even if it was still permitted under the Constitution, even if it was not technically illegal.
Just to say things like him potentially profiting when the G7 Summit was held at one of his properties. That might be illegal. It's definitely a norm violation. Sometimes it was something as simple as when Democrats, Democratic members in the House were taking selfies on the House floor and recording Instagram posts from there. That was a violation of previous norms. It's not necessarily a major catastrophe, but it's something,
Hesse: I know you're doing a lot of work on this right now, so I may be getting ahead of myself both in terms of this conversation around norms and your broader work about how the Republican party has shifted into the tent of Donald Trump. But does it feel like norm violations made Donald Trump's rise into politics possible, or that electing Donald Trump made it easier to violate the standard operating procedure of government? Is it a little bit of both?
Masket: Part of the story here is that Trump himself has made a career out of norm violations. Him getting the Republican nomination in 2016 was in some ways kind of a violation there. That is, he had a very unusual resume for a presidential nominee. He didn't have any political experience. He didn't have any military experience. That's just not the kind of person a party normally nominates for the presidency. He was not really endorsed by very many members of his party when he first ran in the primaries of 2016. There were other people who he was running against, including Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and others who had a lot more party support.
So the fact that he still managed to win that contest was a real violation. So you have someone coming into the presidency without any real connection to the existing party establishments, and indeed was a real thumb-in-the-eye of the existing Republican establishment. He was put in there in many ways to resist a lot of the traditions that a lot of his supporters in the Republican party saw as archaic, as inherently corrupt. He was there to break some of these traditions and break some of those norms. So just having him in that position made it a lot easier for this to happen.
Hesse: You mentioned a few of these examples, but I wonder if you might jog our memories a little bit on some of the things that came up as you were perusing these old stories.
Masket: A big one would be in 2016, there was an opening on the Supreme Court. President Barack Obama was in his last year in office. He nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Senate Republicans refused to even have a hearing or a vote on that. Now, there is no law, there's no part of the Constitution that says they had to have hearings on Merrick Garland, that they had to seat him, but it was pretty significant violation of Senate norms. It was a real departure from the way things ran before that and there's usually some sort of pushback and that sort of thing. Another example we might think of: In 2013, Democrats running the Senate then ended the filibuster on judicial nominees. Before that, it was possible a party could filibuster if they didn't like another party's nominees to a judge position, and Democrats ending the filibuster was a big departure from the norm.
Why were they doing that? Well, because Senate Republicans were filibustering almost every Democratic nomination. That made it very difficult for them to appoint nominees. So often what you see is a norm violation is very often in response to another norm violation. So there's kind of a tit-for-tat thing that goes on in a lot of these cases.
Hesse: I just wanted to ask you about that. Did you get the sense that one norm violation just begets another, begets another?
Masket: I mean, that is a fair amount of what's going on, particularly in the Trump era where the Wall Street Journal, in particular, when they're talking about Democratic violations, a lot of the time they're talking about Democrats investigating the Trump administration. And, yeah, they were much more aggressive investigations than we've seen in the past. But also the things that Donald Trump was alleged to have done were very different from ways that previous presidents have behaved. So a lot of this was, yeah, just going back-and-forth, but once in a while, unusual things do happen.
Another sort of classic example, this is well before my dataset: Franklin Roosevelt. It was a real norm in this country that presidents only would serve two terms in office and it was an example set by George Washington. It didn't appear in the Constitution. It wasn't a hard written rule. Franklin Roosevelt violated that in 1940 and 1944, he ran for a third and fourth term, and at the time, voters obviously were okay with that. They elected him to both the third and fourth term, but there was a pushback to that norm violation in that Congress and then state legislatures approved an amendment to the Constitution preventing any future president from doing that. So often what you see with these violations is some sort of a pushback, whether it's a change in the law to make it impossible, or just another party also violating a norm just to make sure that there's some sort of cost imposed.
Hesse: Seth, I'll get you out of here on this, and I suppose this feels like a silly question given the whirlwind of the last few years, but are you expecting this trend of escalating norm violations to continue?
Masket: Well, yeah, given one of the things that happened in Trump's first term is that he had actually some checks on him from within his own party. There were members of the White House staff, there were people in the foreign policy bureaucracy who would resist him to some extent. He's going to have less of that this time around. He has a Republican party that's much more behind him. He will likely have a White House staff that's much more behind him, which means he's going to be freer to do a lot of things that he's talking about, and some of those things are pretty aggressive — talking about mass deportations.
He's making noise about trying to acquire massive new territory for the United States from Canada or from Greenland or Panama. If he attempts to do these things, there's likely to be significant pushback: Democrats trying to restrict his authority in some places or working on some other ways to simply slow down what the government's doing. Those will likely also be portrayed as violations of norms, but also just in response to the things he's doing that are just sort of wildly outside what we normally expect as kind of regular government behavior.
