Overwhelming the Media With Access

FDR Invites Reporters Into the Oval Office, 1939, White House Historical Assn

As far as I know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president who invited reporters to watch him work in the Oval Office. He had banned any photos of his legs, shrunken from polio, and the largely Democrat press largely complied, leaving behind only three images of his painful efforts to walk. Behind his desk, in the comfort of his chair, FDR could be congenial — and look presidential.

For Donald J. Trump, the purpose and imagery of transparency are even more dramatic. Like a mighty hurricane sweeping across the District of Columbia — including its swamp of bureaucrats, its hostile lobbying corps and its gotcha mainstream media — Trump has used transparency to co-opt the media at its own game. He is sprinting as he juggles hundreds of issues at a time, while his opponents pant behind him, struggling to keep up. He has given the media more access in his first three days than they had at any time during the last four years of the Biden administration. And yet, as they pivot from one issue to the next, the media pundits who was spoke with such self-assurance are now stuttering, even breathless.

Like the liberation of Poland from the grip of Communism, the fall of Washington’s authoritarian institutions has been a joy to behold. With the stroke of Trump’s mighty pen, an affirmative action dictate for federal hiring practices — on the books since Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order # 11246 in 1965 — is gone. Elon Musk called this one move alone “massive.” So too the more recent Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs that found FEMA advantaging hurricane victims who were transgender, and giving no aid to Trump supporters. Merit will guide decisions. No longer will FAA officials be hired by the color of their skin or their sexual preference but, as Martin Luther King famously said, by “the content of their character.” How American.

At State Department outposts all over the world, the Pride Flag is coming down, and maybe the Palestinian one too. The only one allowed now is the red, white and blue. The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America — though this may be an attempt to circumvent Biden’s last minute attempt to ban oil drilling there. In any event, many of those misguided ecological policies of the green crazies — from EV mandates to windmill energy that kills birds in the sky and whales in the ocean — are gone.

None of this is to say that the opposition has been cowed into submission. Hardly.

There will be pushback.

Robby Starbuck, an activist who convinced a lot of Fortune 500 Companies to drop their DEI programs, reports that an NSA whistleblower told him the agency is attempting to rebrand their DEI program as the Equal Employment Opportunity and Accessibility group. He notified the Office of Personnel Management.

There will be lawsuits.

Recently I got a mailing from a group called Public Citizen, “the nation’s leading public interest lobbying organization with more than 500,000 supporters.” I’m glad they wasted their money mailing me their printed materials. What’s striking is not the agenda — save the immigrants, sue the administration, fight regulatory reform — but the language. “We’ll fight for science, evidence and sanity in our health and climate policy,” said the letter. “We’ll fight to keep nonpartisan civil servants from being summarily fired to make way for political sycophants and loyalists.” And this line, which almost sent me laughing out of my chair, “Even with a court system tilted in Trump’s favor, we’ve shown that our lawsuits can stop his authoritarian actions in their tracks” Wow, the same people who said “follow the science” to vaccine and mask mandates, the same folks who protect civil servants from having to work for us, the same ones who stacked the court system against him, those folks are planning to fight Trump’s electoral mandate.

There will be nasty political infighting.

On Capitol Hill, rabid partisans like Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, are holding up the nominations of Trump’s Cabinet choices. Obama got 7 through in his first day, Trump got 1. (Marco Rubio at State). Majority Leader John Thune is threatening to keep the Senate in session through the weekend to drive the confirmation process forward, but two key nominees — Tulsi Gabbard and RJK Jr — have not even had hearings yet.

There will be policies that MAGA may push back on.

Tuesday Trump welcomed three business moguls to stand at his side as he announced their massive $500 billion investment in something he called Stargate, which would build facilities in Texas and other US locations to forward AI technology. Alarmingly, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and one of the three at Trump’s side, said the technology could be used to develop a new mRNA vaccine, this for cancer. The first mRNA vaccine killed a lot of people and severely injured many more. Trump resonates to fulfilling his America First agenda, and he wants to be first in AI. But I wonder if he consulted with Robert Kennedy Jr. on this. For my part, I don’t think we should develop another mRNA vax until we, as a culture, do a forensic autopsy of what went wrong with the first one. Despite Biden’s last minute pre-emptive pardon for Anthony Fauci, we need an investigation into his actions, and we need to see his papers.

And there may be defeats.

In a flurry of executive orders concerning illegal immigration — closing the border and deporting illegal migrants who have committed crimes — was one that would end birthright citizenship for any child born on US soil. This seems to be the hill on which left-wing activists are planting their flag, and they may be smart to do so, as birthright citizenship is guaranteed in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Update: as several readers notified me when this piece first posted, there has long been a debate about whether this provision applies to immigrants in the US illegally.

No matter, Trump is unlikely to look back. He will keep moving, keep acting, keep winning. As commentator Don Bongino noted, Donald J. Trump did more in one day than other presidents have done in two terms.

Panting behind will be a mainstream media that has no idea no one believes them anymore. They have been obsessed — and frightened — that the new Trump White House might rearrange the seating chart in the White House briefing room to give people like Joe Rogan and Aiden Ross front-row seats. But at the rate he is moving — at the speed of his actions and the totality of his press availability — Trump might not have need of such settings, nor his press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

As she said posted the other day, “The most transparent president in history is back.”