Sticking to the Script
Another morning, another mess to clean up. The White House needs to employ a bevy of those folk who used to follow parades. You know the ones. They had buckets to clean up after the horses.
Horses, though, are merely answering the call of nature. What spews forth from the current White House is not natural. It is entirely man made. Specifically, made by one man. Although, as I will explain later, I think he’s more script-reader-in-chief than an actual policy maker. The latter would require effort and thought. So the chaos is his. But the content of the mess is sourced elsewhere.
Nonetheless our doughty media is having a hard time keeping up. It keeps slipping up and falling for the reality show being put on by the President, while the real work of running America has been seconded to Musk, his army of juvenile rug rats, and the Heritage Foundation whose Project 2025 is being enacted page by stinking page.
Now that we are getting used to the chaos one or two features have emerged that allows us to settle down. We are seeing patterns. And within patterns lie the paths to a future counter movement. Right now we watch and absorb the blows. Our time will come.
We need to keep score, though, so that the accounting in future will be accurate.
For one, we will need to make decisions about our media. Each of us will have to decide whether what we are being told is useful, true, or simply an attempt to evade being sucked up in Musk’s hoover.
Take David Leonhardt in this morning’s New York Times. Buried in an article that was, on the surface, a studied and careful critique of Trump’s first few weeks in action — the point was that Trump represents the biggest obstacle to the implementation of the more extreme ideas that Trump himself advocates — was this sentence …
“He has fired federal employees who won’t do what he wants.”
This is not true. The thought is borrowed straight from Trump’s public relations package. Trump is not firing federal employees who don’t do as he wants. He is firing federal employees because they are federal employees. He then uses the excuse that they are somehow resistant to his policies.
The gaping flaw in the argument that federal employees are resisting Trump policy ought to be obvious, even to NYT reporters trying to dodge and weave the incoming abuse from Muskovites. There is no Trump policy. There is, however, a list of complaints and gripes. They are manifested in his executive orders.
What Trump is saying is very different. He dislikes current policy and wants to stop it. Rather than legislate new policy, he is using federal employees as scapegoats and simply fires them. It is much easier to stop the government doing what you don’t like if there’s no one to there to do it. The more difficult and contentious method is to legislate new policy. But that takes work. Our script-reader-in-chief doesn’t like to work.
And don’t clown around by arguing federal employees are not following the “policies” embedded in all of those Executive Orders flying around. They are. That’s what they do. They follow the orders. The attack on federal employees is not grounded in their disobedience. It is grounded in their very existence. Leonhardt ought to make that clear. Instead he falls for Trump’s cover argument. Were Leonhardt correct, the sequence of events would have been very different. There would have been some creation of policy. Followed by a period during which that policy could be enacted. After which, and only after which, there could have been punishment meted out for those federal employees not following orders.
That is not what happened. There was a simultaneous announcement of “policy” and attempt to round up and fire federal employees. There was no interim during which a new policy could be implemented.
Put differently, and more accurately, Trump’s primary policy is simply to fire federal employees whether or not they enact his policies.
That’s bad reporting.
There is better news elsewhere.
The media has had a field day with the asinine announcement concerning Gaza. This is not because the media has suddenly grown a spine. It is because the obvious stupidity of Trump’s views was so compelling that absolutely no one, other than his far right Israeli friends, could believe their ears. Ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and so on, cannot be serious America policy. So either Trump was not beings serious — always a good bet — or he was off his rocker and is sending America so far into the far right murk that there will be no coming back.
We all know he is beguiled buy his self-pronounced mastery of the deal. But moving two million people forcibly in order to get hold of attractive seafront real estate for development into glitzy hotels is neither a good deal nor a statement of serious policy. It is plainly stupid.
And then we have trade deals.
And, once more, we have poor reporting.
Trump was rolled in his retreat from his glorious implementation of high tariffs on his neighbors. The entire world saw Trump beaten into retreat. Both Mexico and Canada gave nothing of note to buy a reprieve. But tariffs were not the point. Trump simply wants photo-ops as he sits in the White House. He needs to show he can still extract deals.
Even if that means reneging on his previous deals. Which the tariff war is.
Yet, the Financial Times slides past that reneging. This morning it simply says:
“While Trump would rather reach deals, he is more willing than he was during his first termite use economic coercion to achieve his goals.”
This is accurate. It is also lame reporting.
The accurate version would refer to Trump’s reneging on the deal he, himself, reached back in his first term. Obviously, that first deal was an utter failure, else he would have no need to renege. So our deal maker-in-chief is simply covering his tracks by going back on his own words. He failed the first time. Maybe bullying will work the second time. Either way he suffered a defeat, and undermined America’s reputation for sticking to its word.
So the heart of the story is his early failure. His deals didn’t produce what he evidently wanted. So now he has to try once more. Our dealmaker is a dud.
Then again, he always was. His business activities more often or not ended up as failures. He declared bankruptcy with astonishing frequency. So frequent that no self-respecting banker will touch his deals any more. His subsequent resurrection came only as a reality TV star reading scripted material.
Which ought to sound familiar.
The hurricane of executive orders and photo-ops these past few weeks are also scripted. Not by Trump. As in his TV career he is reading from a prompter. His concern is image not substance. Someone has to provide that substance. Script writers fill the breach. In our government’s case the script is Project 2025. Trump is reading his lines. We all know when he veers off onto his own: we get the Gaza rubbish.
In that vein, let me end by giving you a few lines from the foreword to that script. They concern those pesky government employees “disobeying” Trump. Heritage has a problem with the government. Not because of employee disloyalty. It simply isn’t Christian or far right enough. Here’s a list of complaints:
- A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the EnvironmentalProtection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rule-making processes;
- Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a fecklessAdministration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity;
- Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms;
- Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists;
- Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”; and
- Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about “intersectionality” and abortion.
That’s a pretty good checklist to follow along with as Trump reads his lines. I wonder if he even bothers to study the script before he reads it out loud? Probably not. That would interfere with golf.
