NBC News complains about access to President-Elect Trump:
In a highly unusual move, President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday night left his Manhattan residence without notifying the reporters covering him or giving any indication of where he was going.
The maneuver seemed to deliberately limit access to the media.
The only way the press eventually ascertained his whereabouts was after a Bloomberg reporter, who happened to be dining at the 21 Club, tweeted a photo of Trump and some of his transition team in the Midtown steakhouse.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks later told NBC News. “He is having dinner with his family.”
Wife Melania, daughter Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner, sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump were all at the restaurant.
I welcome this sort of scrutiny. I look forward to much, much more.
I hope the scrutiny and commentary are fair and unbiased but IMO unfair and biased scrutiny and commentary are better than none at all.
Reporters should enjoy being something other than than the Court stenographer. If its biased, filtering out facts from BS, is the reader’s job.
Can’t he just eat his waffle?
Nope. Uneasy lies the head, etc.
Also, expect Barron to be scrutinized, critiqued, hounded, etc. as no child growing up in the White House ever has. I don’t know that any time has been a good one in which to spend your adolescence in the White House but now is particularly bad.
Here’s an example of what I think we’ll see a lot more of. On the one hand, lobbyists are being cut from Trump’s transition team, satisfying a perceived campaign pledge. On the other hand, his transition team is disorganized.
Wake me when he starts putting his official schedules in burn bags or ditches his Secret Service detail to fly off with Jeffrey Epstein.
I would make a small wager this was done on purpose to continue his war on the media. His base will love this.
Steve
I saw a color-coded map somewhere that visualized who got the media endorsements, and other than a newspaper in West Virginia, Trump received no endorsements. I’d find it again and link to it if I was more certain that it was complete (none of the above endorsements weren’t mentioned), but I would not be surprised if it was accurate.
My goodness, he got one? I’m astonished. That greatly exceeds my expectations. By one, anyway.
So the MSM are basically Paparazzi now.
Paparazzi? Trump is being chased by Papparazzi? You think Princess Diana’s driver is still around and available to drive the Trump car? 🙂
Steve
Trump hates media attention; I hope nothing unfortunate happens as he escapes to a quite spot to check his twitter feeds.
The best rationale given for the press’s “need to know” in this case is that if Trump uses A-1 on a really good steak, it may disqualify him from office. (A-1 is fine on lesser pieces of meat.)
Steve, from what I’ve seen, most Trump supporters, me included, think the press are acting like dipshits for having a fit over this.
I’d take that bit about his transition team being disorganized with a grain of salt. So far the stories seem to be by the same kinds of people that were saying that Trump would never get the nomination, would drop out if he did get it, and could never ever win a single vote other than those of immediate relatives in the November election.
Perhaps it is disorganized (frankly, I’m not how such a team could be well organized for anyone), but the stories about trump for the last 18 months have been so much crap that I don’t trust any of the reporters to know jack shit about what’s going on.
Not only that, ice, but over at OTB you have Dr Taylor, who I rarely agree with but have always respected, Polly parroting that crap while darkly intoning how said disorganization is “concerning.” And they had a Trump as Hitler thread over there today.
It’s been a long time since I’ve witnessed such a collective suspension of rational thinking. The arrogance is stunning, yet they still can’t figure out why they lost.
Trump as Hitler? That’s an improvement, Drew. The Washington Post had a Jewish writer intoning that Trump was WORSE than Hitler ™ months ago. It was really impressive.
The thing is, if Trump really is as bad as Hitler, then the only response for these people is assassination of Trump, and the extermination of all his supporters. The only good Nazis are dead. (Or rocket scientists, of course.) Really, they ought to be out buying guns and starting armed rebellion.
But they’re not. Because they don’t really believe it, and because kale, man-buns and a soundtrack by Maroon 5 aren’t really conducive to the martial arts.
But that’s not even the funniest part. The funniest part is that now they think they’re going to win absolute power by engaging in a meme war on social media with the Chan guys and their legions of Pepes for every occasion big and small. That’s even more stupid than spending more money on Lena Dunham videos during the campaign than campaigning in Wisconsin – all because an algorithm told them to. (“But the algorithm was named for a girl! How could it fail?!”)
Really, some The Onion like group has hijacked reality this year, and they’re trying to see how many stupid things they can cram into it. At this point the only thing this year needs to be even more stupid is to have a George Lucas director’s cut. Who but he?! Who but he?
I saw a good one on Twitter today. Some young woman having vapors tweeted, “I can’t believe millions upon millions of you read Harry Potter, watched The Hunger Games, listened to Hamilton and STILL DID THIS”
Between stuff like that, ANYTHING by Sarah Silverman, and all the “Life comes at you fast” tweets, this has been the best eight days on Twitter EVER.
Regarding the rumors of chaotic transition, i was reminded of a video I watched with Walter Russell Mead going his impressions/predictions for a Trump administration. He thinks Trump will have some elements of Reagan, some FDR, and some Jackson. The chaos part was FDR- IIRC he was saying that FDRs leadership style was to have rivalrous subordinates who never knew who would get the president’s nod, and the resulting chaos meant that the president was the one with all the power. That has the air of accuracy as far as I can tell.
That was my interpretation of George W. Bush’s strategy. I think it’s a sign of a weak manager.
Ike’s staff management strategy, a version of which was also adopted by Ronald Reagan, is the sign of a strong manager.
We’ll see.