Midway through the interview, Pompeo abruptly slammed The New York Times for publishing the name last month of a senior covert C.I.A. officer, calling the disclosure “unconscionable.” The line was met with audience applause. I said, “You’re talking about Phil Agee,” and then repeated the name. Pompeo replied, “I don’t know that name,” and the interview moved on.
My startled rejoinder was not a reference to the covert C.I.A. officer unmasked by The Times, but rather a fumbled attempt to refer to the law governing such disclosures. Philip Agee, as Pompeo and everyone in the audience knew, was the infamous C.I.A. officer who went rogue in the 1970s, wrote a tell-all memoir, and publicly identified the names of scores of C.I.A. officers, front companies and foreign agents.
.. What I didn’t do is disclose the name of any covert officer — nor would I have, since I disagree with The Times’s decision to publish it. So it came as a bad surprise when, the following morning, Dan Scavino, the White House director of social media, tweeted that I had.
.. Nor is it new that Scavino’s attack is also part of a broader White House effort to demonize The New York Times.
.. Taken with Pompeo’s outburst and Scavino’s lie, it raises the question of whether normally apolitical figures aren’t being conscripted into Trump’s war on the press. That’s a worrying thought for institutions, like the C.I.A., that are supposed to remain above the fray to preserve public trust.
The Latest Voice at the Lectern: An Effusive New Yorker
Where Ms. Sanders tends to the dry and sardonic, Mr. Scaramucci is over the top.
.. The uneasy alliance between Mr. Scaramucci and Ms. Sanders will help determine the fate of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reboot his message and survive amid the escalating scandals engulfing his presidency.
The pair represent the competing power centers still vying inside Mr. Trump’s West Wing:
- Ms. Sanders, the Southern-drawling, workmanlike political operative installed by Mr. Priebus; and
- Mr. Scaramucci, the gregarious New York hedge fund manager who has grown close with the Trump family and is new to politics.
.. Telegenic and smooth-talking, he was an eager face of the Trump campaign on television and in the halls of Trump Tower, bringing a brash style and disarming humor to his tussles with reporters.
.. A mother of three young children whom she often mentions in tense moments in the White House briefing room, she inherited her father’s folksy style, his Christian conservatism and his biting sarcasm.
“If you want to see chaos,” she told a reporter on Friday, when asked about the West Wing turmoil, “you should come to my house early in the morning, when my three kids are running around. That’s chaos; this is nothing.”
.. there’s a New York-versus-Washington dichotomy here, New York is winning
.. it was left to Mr. Scaramucci, not the president, to announce that Ms. Sanders would be his new press secretary. The slight did not go unnoticed by veteran communicators, who said it could undercut her at the outset.
.. “It would have been appropriate for him to announce Sarah,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “It empowers her, it sends the message that the president appointed her, he’s standing next to her, and that signal was not there.”
.. While Mr. Trump all but invented the “fake news” moniker himself, some of his advisers, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, have told him that he cannot afford to have a spokeswoman who has such a poisonous relationship with reporters. That was one of the reasons that Mr. Scaramucci was brought on.
.. “He’s very slick and smooth,” said Jennifer Palmieri, another of Mr. Obama’s communications directors. “This removes any ruse that this is a White House that will operate under the transparent standard we expect for a democracy. Instead, it will operate like a country with ministers of propaganda, not press secretaries.”
.. “If the president thinks he’s surrounded by good people fighting for him, defending him and doing a really good job at it, then the president won’t feel the need to push boundaries himself and make the mistakes that he’s made on Twitter,” Mr. Fleischer said.
.. Mr. Scaramucci wished Mr. Spicer well in a distinctly New York style.
“I love the guy,” he said. “And I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.”
Trump Seems Much Better at Branding Opponents Than Marketing Policies
Donald J. Trump, the master brander, has never found quite the right selling point for his party’s health care plan.
He has promised “great healthcare,” “truly great healthcare,” “a great plan” and health care that “will soon be great.” But for a politician who has shown remarkable skill distilling his arguments into compact slogans — “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “Crooked Hillary” — those health care pitches have fallen far short of the kind of sharp, memorable refrain that can influence how millions of Americans interpret news in Washington.
.. Mr. Trump is much better at branding enemies than policies. And he expends far more effort mocking targetsthan promoting items on his agenda... The word choice is memorable. But it’s also the repetition that’s important. In its simplicity and consistency, that message is textbook marketing.. Marketing research also suggests that the more we’re exposed to a belief or a brand, the more likely we are to believe that others share or use it. And so by repeating the slogan, Mr. Trump also feeds the notion that Mrs. Clinton is widely believed to be crooked... Psychologists have another term for what Mr. Trump does here that is so effective. He “essentializes” Mrs. Clinton and his other opponents, like Lyin’ Ted Cruz... This is the important difference between using a descriptive verb (“Ted Cruz tells lies”) and a noun label (“Lyin’ Ted”). Such minor manipulations of language, psychological research shows, can convey much more deep-seated, stable and central characteristics about a subject. And these labels preclude other identities... The only thing you need to know about Marco Rubio, according to Mr. Trump’s branding efforts, is that he lacks stature. And that’s a deeply embedded quality that the man can never change:.. But the affirmative case for the Republican alternative? None of his language has stuck. When Mr. Trump has tried to brand his party’s health care reform efforts in a positive light, his messages have largely taken the form of unmemorable promises about “better” or “great” health care in the future:.. If any word kept coming up — and this one’s not from his Twitter feed — it was his reference to the House bill as “mean.”.. debates over whether the ban should be called a ban... Mr. Trump for the most part hasn’t done that. He has used the tactic to promote himself: He is, above all, “a winner.” The endless repetition and emotional simplicity seemed to work during the campaign as he promoted the WALL (not a fence!). But now that he’s president, what if he cheered the Republican health plan as doggedly as he scorned “Crooked Hillary”? What if he devoted as much effort to defining the stakes of tax reform as he has spent branding his antagonists in the news media?.. One possibility is that these subjects just don’t interest him as much. Or perhaps it’s much harder to condense the case for complex policies — codified in hundreds of pages of legislation and legalese, devised through countless compromises and trade-offs — down to the size of a hashtag. Either way, one of Mr. Trump’s most remarkable skills hasn’t proved an asset on Capitol Hill.
What’s Wrong with Trump’s Tweets?
It’s more than his tone and demeanor.
But the president’s tweets don’t provoke outrage merely because they’re colorful. The issue is that they’re often directed at inappropriate targets.
.. If the president brandished his characteristic tone and demeanor only for that stately purpose, none but rhetorical prudes would denounce the crudeness of his tweets. Unfortunately, Trump has devoted inordinate amounts of energy to mock and deride celebrities ranging from Megyn Kelly and Samuel L. Jackson to Ronda Rousey and Snoop Dogg.
.. In The Art of the Deal he writes, “A little hyperbole never hurts….It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
.. Christ pegged the Pharisees as folk who “love the uppermost rooms at feasts” and “the children of them which killed the prophets” before marking them all as a “generation of vipers.” In a less eloquent, but equally effective lambaste, Martin Luther styledHenry VIII, King of England, as “a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon” and “a mad fool with a frothy mouth.” Compared to either, Trump is a mere amateur at doling out verbal abuse.
.. The president, being a former entertainer, knows that his philippics will fall flat if his audience can’t grasp a crucial reference or allusion, so he makes frequent use of those figures that Americans easily recognize: actors, athletes, and TV news anchors—figures that hold an unduly large proportion of America’s national attention. If the average American knew the names of the thousands of peoples and groups that have nothing but a violent contempt for America and the American way, Trump would undoubtedly spend more of his time tweeting out hourly invectives against them instead of TV hosts (terrorists and tyrants make for easier targets). To a limited extent, the president’s choice to focus his vitriol on celebrities reflects the average American’s tragic ignorance of the people who actually threaten our national welfare.