This week, President Trump intends to accept the Republican nomination from the White House and the First Lady is slated to speak from the newly renovated Rose Garden. This raises both legal and ethical questions. The legal questions primarily involve the Hatch Act, and are being pursued by advocates opposed to the President’s plan.
The ethical questions are trickier. As everyone’s mother has told them, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. In this case, even if it’s legal, it’s not right.
In his chapter in Political Communication Ethics: Theory and Practice Kip Wainscott notes that laws are only one set of rules for political communication professionals. Wainscott, a former election lawyer and senior advisor in the Obama administration, writes “In the United States, our political system has often functioned with assistance from a somewhat dynamic set of unwritten rules and practices...” One of those unwritten rules is not using the White House for partisan political purposes. (Such activities are prohibited in the US House of Representatives - according to the House Ethics Committee, “House rooms and offices are not to be used for events that are campaign or political in nature”).
Part of the reason is that the White House represents the government, and the government should work for all the people, not just supporters of one party or candidate. Using the White House as a campaign setting says “this building is for those who support me,” when it is for everyone - even those who voted for another candidate or didn’t vote at all. While the President occupies the White House for the duration of his or her presidency, it does not belong to them. The White House belongs to us, the people. It is our house that we loan to the head of government for a fixed number of years. The White House is not Donald Trump’s, just as it did not belong to Barack Obama or any President who came before or will come after. Giving a prime-time campaign speech from the White House suggests otherwise, and such a suggestion is wrong.
Saying that the White House belongs to the people and not the President does not just say that our taxes pay for it. The White House belongs to the idea of the American people. Saying the White House is ours says that in our democracy the most famous and important address is the people’s address. The White House is where the President lives and has an office - and it is also a physical representation of an American ideal. Buckingham Palace is the symbolic seat of England but it is also the Royal Family’s home. They live there because of their bloodline. Their children will move in and the queen will never move out. England is a constitutional monarchy, and the monarch keeps the house. More important than who happens to occupy the White House is that it belongs to America. It belonged to the generations that came before us, and it will belong to the generations that follow.
In this light, the White House stands out of time. It is not just an address occupied in a moment - it is a symbol of an idea with a past and a future. The White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Supreme Court, and a handful of other places are “sacred sites” in American civil religion. They are physical symbols of who we imagine our nation to be at its best. Just as Buckingham Palace stands in for a royal history of England, the White House stands in for the history - and promise - of our democratic republic. Turning it into a campaign prop debases not just the White House, but the idea for which the White House stands. Equating a person with the place, rather than the people with the place, tarnishes the idea of the American ideal.
Of course, everything a President does in the White House has political implications. Of course, suggesting that a politician stop doing politics once he or she walks through the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is absurd. But the fiction of a distinction is important. It is symbolically important to say “politics stops here,” even if we know that politics never really fully stops.
Giving a Republican National Convention speech from the White House may or may not be illegal - but it is unethical because it treats the White House as if it belongs to a person and not the people. It treats the White House like a political prop. Political speeches in the White House turn it from an idea into merely a residence.