Editorial: A call for rhetorical civility -- Both presidential tickets should stay out of the gutter

On Thursday, Donald Trump gave a classic Donald Trump press conference — by which we mean another nasty, self-indulgent, divisive and lie-filled show that was fine as entertainment but a disaster for anyone with aspirations to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the fibber. “Nobody was killed on Jan. 6,” he said, erasing and insulting the memories of five people who died on the day of the Capitol incursion and its aftermath. “The New York cases are totally controlled out of the Department of Justice,” he falsely said of criminal and civil charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney and state attorney general. We’ve come to expect all this and worse, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

Remember the three seconds after the assassination attempt when it seemed Trump might have a second life as a more mature uniter?

The fact that the man can’t seem to open his mouth without deceiving and inflaming, though, doesn’t mean Democrats should ever stoop to his level. Generally Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are far more careful with their words. But there are a couple of habits at their rallies that they and their supporters should ditch.

One, stop it with the couch jokes. In his debut rally as Harris’ wingman, Walz challenged Sen. JD Vance to “get off the couch” and agree to debate, a sly reference to a viral lie. The lie started as a joke on the platform formerly known as Twitter and then spread, and spread, and spread. It’s utterly untrue.

Some who understandably revile Trump say they’ll stop spouting the lie when the other side stops saying that they won the 2020 election, a far more pernicious falsehood. But that’s not the way things work: Untruths poison public debate, and the fact that one person or party engages in them irresponsibly doesn’t give their rival license to do the same.

The second tendency we’re not especially fond of is the “Lock him up” chant that’s now a feature of some Harris-Walz rallies, a purposeful echo of the awful and anti-democratic “Lock her up” chants aimed at Hillary Clinton in 2016. These are funnier and not altogether horrible, since Trump — unlike Clinton, who was never even charged with a crime — has actually been convicted by a jury of his peers of crimes (34 felony counts) that could carry jail time.

But in the American system, Trump gets to appeal, a right of which he’s availing himself. And even if he didn’t, it’s more than a little gross for people who are supposed to believe in impartial law and order, not to mention criminal justice reform, to salivate about putting a first time offender behind bars for nonviolent crimes. It’s especially unwelcome when this happens in the context of a political rally and the someone is the other candidate on the ballot.

Let us be very clear again: No matter what Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and Democrats do in this election, there’s no chance they’ll ever stoop to the level of Trump, who revels in falsehoods and poisons politics practically with just about every sentence he utters. But that’s not the standard — that’s the whole point. Decency is.

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