The Trump Administration is the most transparent presidency in history
You know everything there is to know about how Donald Trump thinks and acts. You want your government to be transparent? You got it.
His every utterance get blanket coverage on cable from MSNBC to Fox News, and everything between. We have Politico, Talking Points Memo, and Breitbart dissecting his burps and asides, magnified by the FaceTwit social echo chamber. If, regarding hurricanes, he says “I never even knew a Category 5 existed,” you hear about it instantly.
His private conversations all become public. When he tells people on a golf course that the White House is a dump, Sports Illustrated publishes it.
His White House leaks more than a trailer home after Hurricane Irma has passed by. Just today, The New York Times told us how he humiliated Jeff Sessions in front of a bunch of other people. It seems as if there is no private conversation at the White House that doesn’t get into print eventually.
And of course, every morning we get a revealing peek into Trump’s psyche through his tweets. Thanks to his Twitter posts and the media, we’ve seen three different stories on Trump’s meeting with Democratic congressional leaders regarding the DACA program for children of undocumented immigrants: the Democrats said he made a deal, he tweeted that there was no deal, and then we heard that a deal was in the works after all. Complete transparency.
Whatever you can say about President Trump, you cannot say you do not know him.
A few thoughts on this:
The lack of message discipline in this administration is unprecedented. No other president has allowed so many messages, many contradictory, to go out with so little control over the story.
Were other presidencies anywhere near this chaotic, and we just didn’t hear about it because they controlled the message better? If we got an inside peek this detailed into the presidencies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton in real time, how would they have looked?
Is this level of transparency healthy? Should future presidents resist it, or embrace it?
How would your CEO look if everyone followed them around all day and repeated their every word, and they tweeted every thought that came into their heads?
How would you look if this happened to you?
I disagree. Upon taking office, Trump canceled the public’s right to know who was in and out of the White House (a sign-in procedure that I believe Obama had established) — which is why we didn’t know about the Russian ambassador’s meeting there until Russia put it on social media. I don’t call that transparent.
PS Many of his “transparent” actions are actually what many would call “mistakes.”
I’m with you. The net result of 3 contradictory messages is not that we know more about Trump, but rather that we don’t know where he stands at all.
I think Josh might have been talking with his tongue in his cheek about “transparency,” since the examples he gives aren’t really that informative.
In any case, this president has shown no regard for consistency and a great willingness to claim contradictory opinions or supposed facts in rapid succession. I think Josh’s examples show that, in the absence of real information, news media are content with gossip – the more outrageous the better. And Trump is certainly a master of the outrageous.