I was away most of last week, so I did not see much of the actual newspaper. Two stories stood out in my mind.
First, there was a story claiming that Trump’s Cabinet choices were selected in part on the basis of how they look on television.
First off, consider the double standard. Did the Post go back to previous Presidents and find officials whose looks were off-putting? Who were the bad-looking people that President Obama appointed to top spots in his Administration?
A much more interesting and balanced take on the Trump team comes from Ray Dalio (pointer from Tyler Cowen.) An excerpt:
the people he chose are bold and hell-bent on playing hardball to make big changes happen in economics and in foreign policy (as well as other areas such as education, environmental policies, etc.). They also have different temperaments and different views that will have to be resolved.
I think this is much more important than their looks. Note that President Obama’s most important domestic initiative, the Affordable Care Act, was overseen by Kathleen Sebelius, a career politician who clearly was not appointed for her management skills. She was nominally in charge of the infamous Obamacare web site.
The second story that struck me was the one about the Obama Administration’s decision to abstain on the UN Security Council resolution that caused an outcry in Israel. What struck me was that the lead story was completely free of editorializing, even though the Post‘s editorial page decried the decision. This made me want to go back and give more bias points to the story that the Post wrote about Mr. Trump’s phone call with the President of Taiwan. There, the editorializing dominated the front page.
Yes, the U.N. story could benefit from one of Mark Perry’s Venn Diagrams visualizing for us the inconsistency of people who vehemently decried a single, congratulatory telephone call from the Taiwanese president as overturning decades of settled U.S. foreign policy and that jeopardized our relations with China, and people who sit silent when Obama’s U.N. Ambassador abstains from voting on a very consequential U.N. resolution against Israel, thereby enabling its passage, and in fact and deed overturning the almost 7 decades of unwavering U.S. support for Israel.
OK, this week you failed to disprove the null hypothesis this week and finding minor points to bitch about. So Trump picked people that looked good on TV (sounds reasonable to me for cabinet ) and disliking how the Obama decision was handled is borderline nothing here. I think Obama ‘s decision could have been something as simple as he is going to let the next administration make the decision. Leaving aside:
1) Are you really going to state Trump did not make a stupid mistakes with the Taiwan call? (And his tantrum on the unmanned drone?) China is the second most powerful nation in the world whom we trade a lot. If you are going to grade WaPo, please grade Trump as well.
2) Should Israel simply state that Palestine is part of Israel and stop negotiating a separation? With enough settlements, it seems that is Israel ‘true’ position. I am fine with this position but I rather they state the position instead of ‘pretending’ they don’t occupy the territory. Otherwise, Israel and Palestine are becoming the new UK and Ireland situation.
1. Yeah, we buy a lot of there stuff, so what is China going to do? To quote Conor McGregor, they’ll do nothing. If we buy less stuff our prices go up and we keep some jobs. If they slow industrializing they have civil unrest. We should stop acting like we are the ones over a barrel.
Both of those articles seem the same to me. They both seem like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. The latter is more positive and maybe a little more accurate. Maybe the former go stuck with feeling around the back end and is understandably concluding an elephant is just a giant @$$#0/€.
Even with the first article, I almost sense some editorial softening (maybe I’m sensing a false positive). It is almost like they are either starting to accept the new reality of as Trump as president. Or they even accept that they don’t quite understand there is a new paradigm. It seems they are trying to figure it out, but they also know their readers aren’t up to speed yet and don’t have the vocabulary to unDer stand their explanation. So they have to trivialize Trump’s emphasis on tone and persuasiveness as superficiality because that is what their readers will buy and follow. We will see what their next steps indicate. What narrative pathway will they choose? Even if it is highly negative, as long as they criticize him in a way that accepts his legitimacy that will be positive.
On the issue of looking rhe part and persuasiveness, maybe I am being rosy, but consider how “Mad Dog” provided cover for Trump to pivot on waterboarding (and torture?) that a less…mad doggy…person could nor have done.
From the comments on the second article:
“He plans an end run around Congress (and in my opinion, around other annoying roadblocks like the Consitution) through passionate appeal for aggressive response by his constituents.”
Is this representative of the readership the WaPo has cultivated?