Charlie writes: “Now, those people are chanting euphemisms and the people who were excusing the anti-Trump stuff are clucking about decorum. Evidently, your position is that it almost always matters, and mine is that it almost never matters.”
Again, I think what matters is not that the president is being mocked but that people attending some public event — as opposed to people attending a political rally or taking in the work of some politically minded comedian or writer — are being forcibly conscripted into this pathetic tribal psychodrama.
Chanting mobs are, in my view, pretty much always a bad thing. If you find yourself in a crowd of people who are all facing the same direction and chanting the same thing, you are at church — in this case, a church for people who worship their own hatred and make an idol out of their resentments.
I do remember — because it was not long ago! — when conservatives professed to care a great deal about the propriety of behavior at sporting events and such, and about the desirability of keeping political displays out of such settings. I suspect Colin Kaepernick remembers that, too.
Rather than reducing the presidency and putting it in its place, this grunting imbecility further entrenches the presidency as central to our public life — making the presidency inescapable. I don’t think an inescapable presidency is what you have in mind, but that is precisely what this kind of thing contributes to.