I pretty much agree with everything that Jennifer is saying here.
Where I disagree somewhat is where she insists that only at this time and place in US history an ‘unconventional’ president is what’s needed. I disagree. A real constitutional conservative like Cruz would be making great headway, as well as spearheading a constitutional movement that the Tea Party represents and would rally behind. Also, and more importantly, what Jennifer misses here, is the fact that Washington CAN’T change itself, no single person can be ‘The One’ who turns things around. Only an Article V convention of states for the proposing of amendments to the constitution can do that.
A word on Bannon, Spicer, Kushner, and Trump’s personnel pattern
I have the sense that a lot of people see no sense in the comings and goings of personnel in the Trump White House.
I think that’s because they’re looking through the wrong lens.
Through the lens of conventional patterns – which have now been conventional for so long, no one can remember when it was different – it all looks like an unstable mess. In conventional conditions, a president comes in, hires some top staffers, and then they mostly stick around for a while. Most of them are very conventional “politicos,” even if they’re not polished, buttoned-down Beltway types.
They think and act in the terms of political people, motivated by whatever has become banal in the general political understanding. However the major media define issues, that’s how the White House people understand them. They can be influenced by bad press, insidious narratives, campaigns of opposition. They give up at a certain point on trying to see outside the box of the major media narrative and the political consensus that prevails in Washington. And that’s if they were ever trying to see outside the box in the first place.
But those folks and their administrations had at least one key condition the Trump administration does not have. They weren’t being fought tooth and nail by people still holding jobs in the federal agencies. They weren’t being fought so strenuously by the mainstream media that the only way to get their own narrative out was to blurt out startling soundbites, and tweet in 140 characters.
If the Trump administration followed the conventional patterns of its predecessors, it would be a complete head-scratcher to its voter base, because it would look like it was going down without a fight.
I think people forget that gaining control of his own executive branch is Trump’s biggest fight right now. If you can’t figure out why Steve Bannon seems to be getting the cold shoulder all of a sudden, and Jared Kushner is reportedly running rampant at the National Security Council, take a step back and check your lens.
More here.
