QUIET, PEASANT!

The presidency discovers elementary school bullying.

Trump held an Oval Office ceremony honoring a teenage lifeguard on Monday, which sounds wholesome until one remembers that no ceremonial occasion is safe when Trump spots a woman holding a microphone.

CNN correspondent Kristen Holmes had the audacity to him a question, which was evidently treated as a breach of national security.

The question was about Senator Jon Ossoff’s remark that Trump would rather “build a ballroom” with ever-at-his-disposal aide, Natalie Harp, than attend to presidential business.

Trump characteristically responded by calling Ossoff “Pee-wee Herman.” For those keeping score, a United States senator raised a question about presidential priorities, and the leader of the free world responded with the debating technique of a fourth grader.

When Holmes followed up about North Korea negotiations, Trump told her to “be quiet.” He called her loud, boisterous, fake news, and a fake reporter.

Such poise! Such discipline! SO presidential! Somewhere, Henry Kissinger’s ghost probably requested another death.

I’ve watched Trump berate female journalists for years, and his routine has acquired the stale rhythm of a bad lounge act. A woman asks an unwelcome question. His face tightens. He insults her voice, intelligence, appearance, temperament, or professional legitimacy. Then his admirers congratulate him for being strong. Curiously, his strength requires a heavily guarded room, a government podium, and an opponent who isn’t permitted to respond in kind.

The White House Rapid Response 47 account then decided Trump hadn’t been sufficiently presidential. It called Kristen Holmes “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment” and described journalists as “scumbags” and “the lowest of the low.”

This jewel came from an official White House account, not a drunken uncle posting from a recliner beneath a mounted fish.

Then came the ugliest flourish. The White House claimed Holmes’s children would someday read her question and feel sickened and embarrassed by their mother.

Bringing a journalist’s children into a political attack isn’t clever, forceful, or remotely normal. It’s emotional vandalism performed by salaried adults with federal job titles.

CNN stood by and defended Holmes, as they well should have, calling her an accomplished White House correspondent who asked a relevant and newsworthy question. Correct.

Journalists aren’t decorative foliage. Their purpose isn’t to murmur admiration while the president discusses ballrooms, aides, North Korea, or whatever grievance is presently bouncing around his skull like a loose marble.

Press freedom depends on reporters asking questions powerful people don’t like . That’s the assignment. A president confident in his conduct can answer, decline, redirect, or even say he doesn’t know. Trump chooses humiliation because bullying is the one language in which he never searches for a word.

I suspect Kristen Holmes’s children will be fine. They may even be proud that their mother stood in the Oval Office and did her job while the president and his communications staff behaved like a pack of middle school tormentors who had commandeered the public address system.

The people who should feel sickened aren’t her children. They’re the rest of us, watching the White House convert public service into a taxpayer-funded insult account.