After another week saw leading Republicans accosted in public places, many on the left are arguing that harassment is legitimate

The day after Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia, Maxine Waters, the representative for the California 43rd who has become a leader of the anti-Trump resistance within Congress, addressed a rally in Los Angeles. Up until that point, national Democratic leaders had mostly urged respectful protest in response to the Trump administration.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” she said to cheers from the crowd. “And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome any more, anywhere.”

In the days that followed, other leading Democrats, among them Nancy Pelosi and David Axelrod, distanced themselves from the comments and called for civility. Trump personally attacked Waters, calling her an “extraordinarily low IQ person”. But Waters gave voice, and perhaps legitimacy, to what has become a prominent form of activism since Trump took office: accosting members of his team in public places.

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Over the weekend, Steve Bannon was called “a piece of trash” by a heckler at a bookstore; a bartender gave Stephen Miller the middle finger, apparently causing Miller to throw away $80 of sushi he’d just bought in disgust; and Mitch McConnell was chased out of a restaurant in Kentucky by protesters, who followed him to this car yelling “turtle head” and “we know where you live”.

These follow similar encounters for other members of Trump’s top team. The homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was confronted by protesters chanting “shame” while she ate at a Mexican restaurant. Last week, Scott Pruitt was accosted by Kristin Mink while he was eating lunch. Mink, a teacher, held her two-year-old child as she asked him to resign “before your scandals push you out”. Days later, Pruitt did resign, and although he was probably asked to do so by Trump, in his letter he cited “the unrelenting attacks on me” as his reason for leaving.

After each case, the merits of such an approach have been debated – many have called for civility or argued that protesters leave themselves open to attack if they pursue Trump-like techniques. There has been some consensus that encounters like Mink’s, which are eloquent and non-aggressive, are more acceptable than when protesters chant personal attacks or use threatening language.

Public shaming of Trump regime officials isn’t just useful, it’s a moral imperative Markos Moulitsas

Yet while their morality is debated, there is an overall feeling, including from the targets of the attacks, that these encounters have created exactly what Waters was advocating, a feeling that those who chose to work with Trump are “not welcome” in many parts of society.

“Public shaming of Trump regime officials isn’t just useful, it’s a moral imperative in these difficult times,” says Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos and the author of last year’s The Resistance Handbook: 45 Ways to Fight Trump, which offers practical advice for protesters and advocacy groups. “We have a Republican party that has surrendered to the Russians, encourages white supremacists and Nazis, separates families, and locks up children in cages, and we’re supposed to treat these people as respected members of society? We have no choice but to turn them all into pariahs, now and forever into the future.”

It doesn’t hurt the cause that each occurrence of shaming is reported widely. At a time when every weekend marks another rally or march, it’s often difficult for protest movements to get media attention. But addressing members of the cabinet or leading Republicans directly, particularly if there is accompanying video footage, is a near-certain way to ensure a protest makes an impact.

A number of the incidents, including those involving Pruitt and Bannon, have also involved female protesters addressing male politicians, notable considering how much of the anti-Trump movement has been led by women. Emma Gray, author of A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance, a book that seeks to capitalize on the political energy of the Women’s March, agrees that this is a positive way to protest. “We’re way past hand-wringing over ‘civility in a democracy’ when basic human rights are at stake. There’s nothing ‘civil’ about stripping away women’s access to reproductive healthcare or ripping children away from their parents at the border with no plan to reunite them.”

Manners or morals? The choice is easy when the stakes are this high | Francine Prose Read more

Most establishment Democrats are telling protesters not to harass members of the administration. The minority leader, Chuck Schumer, made a speech on the Senate floor calling for civility following Waters’ comments, saying: “If you disagree with a politician, organize your fellow citizens to action, and vote them out of office, but no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right – that’s not American.”

The ACLU, which has helped organize many of the major Trump resistance efforts, has also said that Sanders should have been allowed to eat at the Red Hen restaurant. In a statement on their website, it said Sanders had the same rights to eat at the Red Hen as the gay couple who wanted a wedding cake from Masterpiece Cakeshop, arguing that “once one chooses to operate a business open to the public, one takes on at least a moral – and often a legal – obligation to adhere to the norms that underlie the very definition of ‘public’. When a business turns away a customer, whether it’s the Red Hen refusing service to Sanders, or Masterpiece Cakeshop refusing service to Charlie Craig and David Mullins, it says, ‘You aren’t a legitimate member of the public.’”

For Moulitsas, though, that’s exactly the point. Excluding Trump officials from the public sphere is a powerful political tool. He says it’s up to Trump officials to decide whether destroying other people’s lives is worth the public shame. “None of them should ever be allowed to have a peaceful meal in public, unless they want to spend all their time in rural flyover country they pretend to love so much. They are destroying lives every single day, literally killing people in many cases, so they don’t get to be treated like royalty. They need to be confronted with the reality of their choices.”