Morning and afternoon
Dear god.
Trump gets a Big Special Treat twice a day, prepared for him by his handlers.
Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.
These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.
Tweets. It’s somebody’s job to find and screenshot tweets so that Trump will feel puffed up and conceited and happy.
Can you imagine Obama doing that?
One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: “It needs to be more fucking positive.” That’s why some in the White House ruefully refer to the packet as “the propaganda document.”
Thus we learn that there is no one both intelligent enough and brave enough to say no, this is the opposite of what we should be doing. Nobody to say: “Look, conceit he’s already got, what he needs is to grasp that he has faults, and what they are, and what most people think of them.”
The process of assembling the folder begins at the Republican National Committee’s “war room,” which has expanded from 4 to 10 people since the GOP won the White House. A war room — both parties have one regardless of who’s in the White House — is often tasked with monitoring local and national news, cable television, social media, digital media, and print media to see how the party, its candidates or their opponents are being perceived.
How Trump is being perceived is, for the most part, not as a good or clever man.
“Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one former RNC official said.
Maybe it’s bad for the country that the president is being systematically shielded from how hard most people hate him and what a terrible job they think he’s doing.
Of course, every White House monitors media coverage to see how they’re being covered, and the RNC may have decided more staff was needed after the party won the White House. As the political media environment has become faster-moving and more frenzied, the efforts to follow it have also become more robust. The Obama White House usually had at least one very caffeinated point person and two others dedicated to watching Twitter, online publications, print media, and cable news, and then compile relevant clips and send them around to White House aides.
But the production of a folder with just positive news — and the use of the RNC to help produce it — seemed abnormal to former White House officials. “If we had prepared such a digest for Obama, he would have roared with laughter,” said David Axelrod, the senior adviser to Barack Obama during his first two years in the White House. “His was a reality-based presidency.”
I miss that.
I recall being alarmed and appalled when it came out that Bush Jr’s daily briefing was headlined with somewhat warlike passages of scripture. But somehow, this seems worse.
He doesn’t have time to read intelligence briefings though.
If he were taking time to read intelligence briefings, it might diminish the amount of time he has to read glowing praise of himself.
Offering Donald Trump an intelligence briefing is like offering a snake a pair of shoes.
Hahahahahahaha good one.
Trump is empowering what I’ve always known about government secrets….there are none.
Monkey man Operates with what my 10 year old could learn in ten minutes of googling.
He is the pinnacle of all who still think he’s operating with a budget of more than four firing neurons.
Kevin Henderson, and those four firing neurons are all firing one word: Me.
All Trump can think about is what he wants. Anything else is totally foreign. All that so-called caring about the common man? That was only because he got cheers whenever he said it. He only ran for president because somehow he believed his celebrity was the real deal, not just the result of a stupid reality TV show with a stupid catch phrase that for some reason people decided to watch in fairly large numbers (and at times, it got hard for those of us not interested in it to avoid hearing “you’re fired!” endlessly).
This is kills me about Trump. (Well, one of the things that kills me about Trump.) This pretending that he has opinions and conclusions and strategies when it comes to, you know, issues. As though he’s ever cared enough about (name it) monetary policy, the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool to change another country’s policies, the health care system, the justice system, election integrity, etc. etc. etc. to have developed genuine opinions. We could have elected someone with experience and opinions and concerns. Someone who cared about something. Would you have agreed with her about everything? No, I’m sure none of us would have. (About everything? How could we?) But she had thoughts and plans and had made observations and was interested in the world and was a serious person.
Actually, I still can’t imagine an easier choice.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1627507323934389/?type=3&theater
In either ‘The Guns of August’ or ‘The Proud Tower,’ Barbara Tuchman describes how Kaiser Wilhelm II received a daily ‘good news only’ newspaper, printed in gold ink. Full of glowing praise for German imperialism and his royal guess who.
Oh does she?! I’ll have to seek that out. I found a book of her essays at a Little Free Library the other day and have been bowled over by her.
My husband got me the Guns of August for my birthday, because he was tired of my saying I thought WWI was boring. You’re right, I was bowled over by her, too. And he was right – WWI is anything but boring, and her book helped me understand more how WWI actually led into the chaotic nightmare that was the 20th century (which led into the chaotic nightmare that the 21st century is shaping up to be).