The So-Called Trump Circus
by Rod D. Martin
August 19, 2018
I love the Wall Street Journal, but sometimes they -- like a lot of Republicans -- completely miss the ever-lovin' point. Take this paragraph:
"The Trump Administration’s regulatory rollback continues to be overshadowed by the White House circus. In case you missed the news late last week, the Education Department is moving to reverse two Obama rules that would have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and diminished education options for students who can’t afford tuition at Stanford or Georgetown."
What's wrong here? Simple: The regulatory rollback -- which the Journal rightly considers amazing -- is not being "overshadowed by the White House circus", but rather is being enabled by it.
What do I mean? Think back to the last decade, when Bush attempted various deregulations, or when poor Alberto Gonzales attempted to be a solidly conservative Attorney General, or when the President pushed Social Security reform.
Didn't get very far, did they? Because by focusing on one or two problems at a time and debating them seriously, W. gave the Enemedia the opportunity to overpower him at every turn, focusing fire against his priorities and nuking more of them than not (along with a lot of his best people).
Trump learned the lesson. Our new, supposedly "unfocused" President, keeps attention on himself so that his people can work, and constantly distracts the media from real policy changes with the sort of tabloid idiocy they cannot resist giving wall-to-wall coverage.
Betsy DeVos's outstanding reforms would get annihilated in a Bush Administration, by a united media pouring the sum of all their rage and hate upon it, and upon her. They would defend the pre-existing leftist policies to the death -- as in, "children will die!" -- and they'd drive her from office. Ask Alberto Gonzales.
But in Trumpworld, there's no time to cover Secretary DeVos, because CNN spends 100% of its time on John Brennan's latest charge of treason, and Omarosa's latest tape of nothing.
It may not be pretty, but it's over-the-top effective, for our team and for the country. The staid Journal may have trouble understanding it: they're genetically predisposed not to see it. But that doesn't make it any less true.