It's becoming clearer that Steve Bannon is making policy while Trump watches TV. What next, press? How to cover? Pretend business as usual? We are still struggling to grasp what it means to have President Bannon in the WH making decisions. It's not entirely incompetence.
Chris Cillizza/WaPo:
Trump promised disruption. That’s exactly what he’s delivering.
While he didn’t attach a ton of specifics to his proposals, it’s very hard for me to believe that the vast majority of people who voted for Trump expected anything other than what they got from him in this first week. In fact, they are likely overjoyed that Trump — unlike most pols — is doing what he said he would.
None of the above is to invalidate or undermine those who oppose Trump. Their objections — and willingness to act on them via protests, petitions and legal means — is at the heart of a healthy democracy.
My point is only this: Trump is governing almost exactly how he said he would during a campaign that he won. No one should be surprised.
Reminder: Trump is a Chaos agent. He intends to go farther, or at least Bannon does. Our job is to be in the way.
WaPo:
Questions multiply about Bannon’s role in administration
The chief political strategist was directly involved in shaping the controversial immigration mandate, according to those familiar with the process.
Meanwhile, leave Trump voters alone. Don’t make it us vs them. Concentrate on the WH/Bannon/Miller.
Eliot A. Cohen/Atlantic:
A Clarifying Moment in American History
There should be nothing surprising about what Donald Trump has done in his first week—but he has underestimated the resilience of Americans and their institutions.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
More facts, fewer pundits: Here’s how the media can regain the public’s trust
There’s no going back — and we shouldn’t want to. We’re far better off with the multitude of choices and voices, and the far-reaching distribution of the digital age.
But there may be something to learn anyway.
“What we don’t need now is pure stenography, but we also don’t need what the Nixon people derided as instant analysis,” Shribman said. “ ‘Just the facts’ should be less a slogan than a reality.”
Then again, the too-neutral “view from nowhere” approach that informs old-school journalism has its critics. Journalists, they say, should declare their biases up front to engender reader trust.
As Mitchell noted, “This is a divided America, and the public is going to pick and choose their news sources based on ideology.”
But amid this disagreement, there is a clear consensus on yet another point, among not only journalists but also the public. More than three in four Americans want the media to “emphasize inaccurate statements,” Pew reports.
Benjamin Wittes/Lawfare Blog:
The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.
NBC is reporting that the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. Moreover, the New York Times writes that Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a “no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders—including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.)
This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all.
Of course not. If it were reviewed it would have been rejected.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
The most worrisome moment for me in a very ominous week was not President Trump’s bizarre rant about crowd size, his bogus claims about election fraud or his moves toward bringing back torture, blocking refugees and provoking a trade war with Mexico.
The most troubling moment was when he spoke about the weather.
“It was almost raining,” the new president told CIA workers in Langley, recounting his inaugural address, “but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. In fact, when I first started, I said, oh, no. The first line, I got hit by a couple of drops. And I said, oh, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it. But the truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured.”…
I rehash this weather history because it’s not subject to debate. This is tantamount to Trump declaring black is white or day is night. It was overcast, and he declared that it was “really sunny.”
This disconnect from reality is my biggest fear about Trump, more than any one policy he has proposed. My worry is the president of the United States is barking mad.
He is. And how will media cover that?
NY Times Magazine:
What’s normal? ...
Our key finding can be illustrated with a simple example. Ask yourself, “What is the average number of hours of TV that people watch in a day?” Then ask yourself a question that might seem very similar: “What is the normal number of hours of TV for a person to watch in a day?”
If you are like most of our experimental participants, you will not give the same answer to the second question that you give to the first. Our participants said the “average” number was about four hours and the “normal” number was about three hours. In addition, they said that the “ideal” number was about 2.5 hours. This has an interesting implication. It suggests that people’s conception of the normal deviates from the average in the direction of what they think ought to be so.
Our studies found this same pattern in numerous other cases: the normal grandmother, the normal salad, the normal number of students to be bullied in a middle school. Again and again, our participants did not take the normal to be the same as the average. Instead, what people picked out as the “normal thing to do” or a “normal such-and-such” tended to be intermediate between what they thought was typical and what they thought was ideal.
Charles M. Blow/NY Times:
Some have suggested that we in the media should focus a bit less on these lies — some of them issued in tweets and some in interviews or news conferences — and focus more on policies, particularly the ineptitude of the gathering cabinet and the raft of executive orders that Trump himself is signing.
But I take the position that this is all worthy of coverage, that there are simply different kinds of news being unearthed about this administration that exist on different strata.
To take it even further, it may be these seemingly smaller infractions that produce the greater injury because the implications are more profound. Trump does not simply have “a running war with the media,” as he so indecorously and disrespectfully spouted off while standing on the hallowed ground before the C.I.A. Memorial Wall. He is in fact having a running war with the truth itself.
Donald Trump is a proven liar. He lies often and effortlessly. He lies about the profound and the trivial. He lies to avoid guilt and invite glory. He lies when his pride is injured and when his pomposity is challenged.
This was a good show last Thursday:
It means some people just can picture the process, skip the steps and get the picture, others need to follow the steps to get to the same place. Trump, otoh, tells his followers there are no intermediate steps at all. Just go from step 1 (we are not safe) to step 10 (Muslim ban). Easy and simple. Let him worry about the complicated intermediate steps, which he will do by assigning step production to e.g., Paul Ryan and then blaming him when it fails. His followers will buy it, too. They don’t want complicated.They want Bold ™ Strong™ Action ™.
Watch for it with health reform. More explanation here: