But in other cases, Trump’s anger is aimed at members of his own staff and probably his own family, who use the media to undermine competitors in the administration. Senior adviser Steve Bannon uses his old website, Breitbart.com, to throw brickbats at his enemies. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a sort of prince regent in the Trump administration, is widely believed to use MSNBC’s Morning Joe for similar purposes.
The whole spectacle is actually pretty hilarious. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” Trump thundered in a speech in February. “Let their name be put out there.” A few weeks later, Trump met in the Oval Office with news anchors who attributed his comments to a “senior administration official.” Indeed, the president frequently calls reporters — Americans he describes as “enemies of the people” — on “background,” doling out dollops of “anonymous” information.
.. What’s new in this White House is not the phenomenon of leaking but the scope and nature of it. After every meeting, participants race to their phones to put their anonymous spin on what happened. The reports read like parody. The Washington Post’s in-depth story on the Comey firing was based on “the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans.”
.. few people in the Trump White House have much experience working in a White House, contributing to the shocking lack of internal discipline and clear lines of authority.
.. Some reporters tell me it’s simply “[posterior]-covering.” Maintaining good relationships with the press is an insurance policy. It’s always useful to have friends in the media, particularly if an administration goes off the rails. Being able to tell reporters, “Well, you know it wasn’t me” when stuff hits the fan could save your career. Another explanation is that this kind of palace-intrigue reporting has become a staple of the new media climate.
.. But I think the problem ultimately goes back to the president himself. He thrives on drama, particularly drama he creates. He cares about, and monitors, media coverage like no president in American history. Trump likes to pit subordinates against each other, which encourages staffers to be free agents.
.. his failure to provide a consistent philosophical or policy agenda beyond “Make the boss look good.” In short, he values loyalty above all else but offers few incentives for it.
The Most Abused Press Secretary in History
Sean Spicer, meet Ron Ziegler.
.. Nixon didn’t value that perspective, though—“The press is the enemy … write that on a blackboard a hundred times,” he once told Kissinger.
.. In the week after the Watergate arrests in June 1972, as the news broke that the burglars had ties to the Nixon reelection campaign, Nixon ordered Ziegler to minimize the crime. He did so memorably, dismissing it as a “third-rate alleged burglary attempt.” When Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued the story, Ziegler accused them of “shabby journalism” and “character assassination.”
.. he continued to duck and weave in Spicer-like fashion, and even introduced his own “alternative facts” into the lexicon of politics, begrudgingly declaring the president’s long-standing insistence of White House guiltlessness “inoperative.” “If my answers sound confusing,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him saying during a 1974 White House briefing just a few months before Nixon resigned, “I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing—and I’m not in a position to clarify it.”
.. Praise and censure in the Nixon years were parceled out according to an aide’s willingness to defy the hated press—a pattern that has also been attributed to Trump.
.. Ziegler was just 29 years old when he became the White House press secretary. It was a job that most thought would go to Herb Klein, a former Southern California newsman and longtime campaign spokesman for Nixon, but the new president wanted someone more compliant. Ziegler’s inexperience was itself seen as an insult by the White House press corps
.. Most of the press corps began by treating Ziegler like a puppy-dog frontman, recognizing his advertising background and low rating in the inner circle to be the insult it really was,” Safire recalled.
Donald Trump says he wants to fix cities. Ben Carson will make them worse.
While Carson was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University medical school, located in one of the nation’s poorest and most troubled big cities, he took little interest in urban issues. In his ill-fated primary campaign, he railed against “social engineering,” a swipe at efforts to open housing in mostly well-to-do, overwhelmingly white communities to minority home buyers and renters.
.. Trump’s selection of Carson echoes Ronald Reagan’s choice of Samuel Pierce as his HUD secretary. Like Trump, Reagan had lashed out against inner cities and pledged to slash social spending. Like Trump’s supporters, the majority of Reagan’s voters did not live in cities. And like Trump, he had little support among African Americans. But like Trump, Reagan wanted a black face in a high place for a little legitimacy in a post-civil-rights-movement White House. And, like Trump, Reagan had pledged to loosen housing and financial regulations.
.. HUD was an easy target for Reagan, as it is for Trump. It had been created by Lyndon B. Johnson at the peak of his Great Society to meet the huge demand for affordable housing in American cities and to grapple with the ravages of mass suburbanization, nearly complete racial segregation and capital flight from cities, all of which had been heavily bankrolled by the federal government.
.. In 1968, HUD took on the additional responsibility of “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” the gargantuan task of undoing decades of discriminatory real estate and home-lending practices.
.. None of these missions was popular: Republicans criticized HUD as a meddling “big government” agency. Southern Democrats railed against its civil rights goals. And suburban whites fiercely resisted even modest efforts to open the housing market to racial minorities.
.. the department became a bastion of crony capitalism, particularly under Republican presidents.
.. real estate speculators and politically connected developers, who sold shabby houses to desperate buyers at above-market prices, backed by inflated appraisals
.. One of Pierce’s assistant secretaries resigned when it came out that HUD staffers had helped him type and proofread his book, “Privatizing the Public Sector.”
.. Staffers directed money to Republican-connected lawyers, consulting firms and developers. One of the dozens swept up in the resulting investigations by federal prosecutors and Congress was Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort , who had successfully lobbied for about $43 million in federal subsidies for a shabby New Jersey housing complex. He received $326,000 in fees
.. Like Pierce, Carson is shaping up to be a token black Cabinet member. Trump has not appointed any other black officials so far
.. We don’t know much yet about how Carson will run HUD, but his lack of experience with urban policy, his bromides about socialist planning, his indifference to fair housing and his calls for individual boot-strapping don’t bode well for the future of metropolitan America. And in a climate of privatization and deregulation, championed by the country’s new real estate developer in chief, Carson’s inexperience could be a serious liability.
Closing Arguments: The Logic of Negative Campaigning
Still, some commentators say, by concentrating on taking down her opponent rather than marketing her own agenda to the voters, Clinton risks achieving a victory without earning a mandate.
That argument should be questioned, too, though. In the bitterly divided Washington of today, there may be no such thing as a mandate: Republicans in Congress will oppose a President Clinton no matter what she does. (We’ve already seen this in their pre-election vows to fight her nominees to the Supreme Court.)
.. which one of Trump’s grotesqueries and vulnerabilities to focus on.
- Con man and victimizer of the small guy?
- Chronic sexist and sexual predator?
- Race-baiting demagogue?
- Stunning lack of experience?
- Policy ignoramus?
- Serial tax dodger?
- Wannabe-authoritarian strong man who seems eager to trample on the Constitution?
- Thin-skinned narcissist and megalomaniac?