In the complicated emotional manipulation that was yesterday's lawprof hearing, one almost random thing stuck way out.

I can only guess what goes on in other people's head. It was hard enough for me as a law professor to understand how much law students were getting out of a discussion, and those were carefully selected participants who were supposed to have read a text that was exactly what we were talking about. But what did Americans get out of yesterday's hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, where professors jabbered all day, prodded by posturing politicos professors?

What would James Madison think of us right now, can you tell me, professor? How about Hamilton?, what does he think, because we care about what that guy thinks now because of the Broadway musical about him. Well, this is the most impeachable thing that ever came down the impeachment trail. If this isn't impeachable, then nothing is impeachable, and any President will be able to do anything and it won't be impeachable! On the contrary! If this is impeachable, then every President will always have to be impeached!

Ugh! Such a crazy clutter! I turned away, and I'm used to absorbing legal-ish stuff like that. It's no challenge to understand. For me, it's like reading a young adult novel. It's just a matter of whether I'd want to consume something on that level. But I'm a former law professor. I taught all the separation of powers materials they were talking about. And I'm old and have lived thought not just the Clinton impeachment hearings but the Nixon impeachment hearings.

So who am I to guess at what was going on inside 100 or so million heads? What, if anything, got from that hearing into the mind of the voter? Maybe mostly just a vague sense of reinforcement in whatever level of hostility or support they already felt for Donald Trump. But I think there was one thing that rose about the chaotic verbiage: The Child!

My Google search just now (click to enlarge and clarify):



Watch the video:

CORRECTION: ‘While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron’: Prof. Karlan uses the Trump family to outline the Constitution’s rule that there can’t be titles of nobility. (We are deleting an earlier tweet that misspelled Barron Trump’s name.) pic.twitter.com/ZLrxcbxUhk

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 4, 2019

Professor Karlan, making the point that the U.S. President is different from a king, offers one example: "The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron." That's a well-crafted joke, I said out loud when I watched it. But, oh, what a mistake! I don't know if she wrote that joke all on her own or if she tested it on others, like a stand-up comedian. But I bet if she tested it, she tested it within a cocoon. I think you can tell by her demeanor that she believes it is a killer joke, and it would kill in the law-school, academic context.

It's such a neatly scripted zinger. It flew right out of the room and all over Twitter. Trump supporters immediately weaponized it: She went after the child. It's despicable!

Melania got into the game:

A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it.

Karlan apologized, but nobody into the original weaponization accepted the apology. The apology was just more fuel for outrage:

The LOONEY LIBERALS are mad that she apologized for attacking #BarronTrump

THIS IS NOT A REAL APOLOGY

Pamela Karlan & the Democrats should not have dragged a 13 year old into politics!

This is not #FakeOutrage This is real outrage! Leave kids alone

pic.twitter.com/AduZVAOxXK

— Terrence K. Williams (@w_terrence) December 5, 2019

The anti-Trump side didn't let it go either. The lawprof's scripted joke is pushed by them too. The hashtag #FakeOutrage is trending on Twitter. Example:

Well it's safe to say @FLOTUS is the MOST disliked First Lady in history. No amount of Botox or designer clothes could fix that #FakeOutrage pic.twitter.com/OkdY8zPEkU

— Camilla Kay (@RandomlyShe) December 5, 2019

My legalistic defense of Karlan would be that she targeted not the child, but the father, who had the arrogance to give his child a name that corresponds to a title bestowed by British royalty.

I see many problems with this defense.

1. In first place, I put feminism: Karlan assumes that the man gave the child his name and that erases the woman.

2. The boy's name is Barron, not Baron. (The zinger was so viral that dumb old Reuters, so eager to be a part of the contagion, misspelled the boy's name.)

3. A man who is king wouldn't have a baron for a son. His son would be a prince. If Trump's motivation were to aspire to the status of king, he'd have named his son Prince. He didn't. (And it's too late in American culture to mock the name Prince.)

4. Baron is damned low in the ranking of titles. And — from the Wikipedia article "Baron" — "The word baron comes from the Old French baron, from a Late Latin barō "man; servant, soldier, mercenary"... The scholar Isidore of Seville in the 7th century thought the word was from Greek βᾰρῠ́ς 'heavy' (because of the 'heavy work' done by mercenaries)... Cornutus in the first century already reports a word barones which he took to be of Gaulish origin. He glosses it as meaning servos militum and explains it as meaning 'stupid', by reference to classical Latin bārō 'simpleton, dunce'... but the Oxford English Dictionary takes this to be 'a figment.'"

5. Independently of all that, "Baron" is a traditional name:

In Hebrew, the fairly common Israeli surname "Bar-On" (usually contracted to Baron) means "son of strength/vigor/potency"; in many languages, "Baron" refers to the title of nobility. The name “Baron” in old English also refers to a wealthy male landowner.

Wealthy male landowner — that's as apt as you can get. For Trump to call his son Barron is to identify him quite precisely, not to have an inflated arrogance about what he could become.

Let me finish up here by saying that I agree that the outrage is fake, but just about everything in the discussion of Trump is fake, and the pro-Trump side should fight hard. Karlan intended a hurtful slam, a winged zinger that would have the whole world laughing contemptuously. Watch that clip again. She believes she's got something. But it was too good of a line. Everyone noticed. And now, it's almost the only thing that was noticed in all that tangle of law/"law" that the professors strewed before us yesterday.

So it was a big fail for the anti-Trump lawprofs. The look of it from a distance was that they hate Trump and they were called by politicians who hate Trump to express hate for Trump.