From the right: Trump Should Hit the Campaign Trail
With critics saying President Trump’s administration is “a hot mess” while supporters maintain he’s “accomplished more in three weeks than many presidents do in years,” Byron York at the Washington Examiner says the president should start selling his achievements. During the campaign, he recalls, “Trump developed a fondness for performing in front of big rallies” but hated “the drudgery that accompanied campaigning.” So “why not start holding rallies again?” In fact, “it’s not unusual for presidents to take to the campaign trail.” Plus, “campaigning for his initiatives would give Trump the vehicle to explain an impressive set of actions.” As for protesters, “as a matter of optics it would not hurt to have a screaming maniac trying to shut him down.”
Media critic: The Times’ Anti-Trump Standard
The New York Times, says Michael Wolff in Newsweek, “enshrines new Trump-age journalistic principles: that is, journalism should be anti-Trump.” And because the paper also doesn’t like The Wall Street Journal, it’s engaged in “considerable tsk-tsking and self-congratulations” over grumblings by some Journal reporters who agree that “Trump ought to be covered with explicit skepticism, if not open resistance.” But the Journal’s coverage, says Wolff, “would be, in any White House other than Donald Trump’s, the standard way to cover a president.” Unfortunately, “in The New York Times’ increasing view, you are either for Trump, a moral no man’s land, or you are against him. There is no journalism in between.”
Bushie: Hillary Is Running in 2020
Matt Latimer, who wrote speeches for President George W. Bush, says he’s convinced “Hillary Clinton will run for president. Again.” Writing in Politico, he cites the post-election scaling back of the Clinton Global Initiative — “a ground zero of grief for the Clinton campaign” — and the floating of rumors she might run for mayor of New York. Plus, her ongoing Twitter needling of Trump sounds “very much like she [is] still on the campaign trail.” Then there was her concession speech last November: “Absent in her remarks was any indication, as one might have expected, that she was going gentle into that good night, handing the baton to a new generation or even to a new leader.” Besides, he adds, “seeking the White House has been her aspiration for decades. What else is there for her to do?”
Historian: Yes, We’re Getting Tougher With China
Much is being made of President Trump’s call to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, promising to honor the “One China” policy, widely seen as a major reversal on his part. But Paul Richard Huard at The Arc says “the real story” is how Trump “sent a forceful message” to Beijing this month through Defense Secretary James Mattis. In Japan, Mattis reportedly pledged privately that the United States would take “a more aggressive stance” toward freedom of navigation and step up patrols in the South China Sea. So, suggests Huard, “Trump’s ‘One China’ comments might just be a carrot while the new administration promises the big stick of US naval power in a way far more active than what President Barack Obama originally set forth.”
Culture critic: Now It’s Princeton Under Fire To Rename
Yale’s decision to rename one of its dorms, originally named for onetime Vice President John C. Calhoun, a champion of slavery, is bringing “renewed pressure” on Princeton to do the same for an institutions named for Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. The reason, says Kieran Corcoran at Heat Street, is that activists have branded Wilson “a white supremacist” who “paved the way for Trump.” Wilson “agreed to re-segregate large parts of the federal government, expressed sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan and regularly worked to exclude or dissuade black people from public life.” So they want his name “scrubbed” from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. But Princeton says the question of renaming “has been fully addressed by the trustees and will not be reopened.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
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