It has happened. After a week of trump chaos, the New York Times has gone hammer down and made Trump's temperament the lead story. The Sunday Times is the big one. It goes all over. This is going to evoke some tweets. Both Trump and the New York Times know that binary battle is what people relish, even though it is often more smoke than substance.
The Times front page lead story begins with Trump in New Orleans a week ago. He is all set to hype his health care ideas. But then he learns that a Hawaii judge has condemned his second Muslim ban to certain death, at least until Trump can maybe get Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court.
But that part of the story has not happened yet. The hearings on Gorsuch begin tomorrow.
His own making?
The Times insists in this major piece that Trump brings everything on himself. It calls Trump "an agitator incapable of responding proportionately to any slight" and adds that he seems "hell-bent on squandering his honeymoon." Some might argue that it never was a honeymoon. Trump seems engaged in trying to upend the country but as the days pass we find he has more allies than we imagined. There may be a method to the madness.
In One Rocky Week, Trump’s Self-Inflicted Chaos on Vivid Display https://t.co/X8ImofJYgo
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) March 19, 2017
Is Ari Fleischer a shrink?
The source of the Times' insistence that Trump is being self-defeating is Ari Fleischer who was George W.
Bush's press secretary. The final paragraph of the big story is given over to Fleischer who concludes that Trump could be very successful that "he is so red-hot controversial.” The problem with assigning defeat to Trump's temperament is that the facts suggest even his most outrageous statements serve him well. If he is a con artist, one wonders if he may be conning the New York Times most of all.
Underneath it all
Another Times story offers a good explanation of Trump's capacities. The Gorsuch story is about to explode as hearings begin. It suggests that behind the Trump explosions and seeming chaos there is a cool pattern of stubborn progress by a relatively united right wing to achieve total control of life in America. They know they lack a majority. Why not a cagey shock jock to distract America while we rob the chicken coop blind?
