This weekend, less that 24 hours after he was sworn into office, President Trump picked the first fight of his first term.
It was not over his excellent initial executive orders, which will provide relief for insurance customers, begin to weaken the props holding up Obamacare and provide some satisfaction for taxpayers who don’t want to pay for other people’s abortions. The president and his team instead complained about media reporting of the crowd size at his inauguration.
“[P]hotographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said, and he then spent the next half of a 1,000-word statement on live TV litigating the crowd numbers in painstaking detail.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” he went on. “The president is committed to unifying our country, and that was the focus of his inaugural address. This kind of dishonesty in the media, challenging that bringing [of] our nation together, is making it more difficult.”
There is room for debate over Spicer’s underlying points. But unless this issue was intended as some kind of feint, as it may have been, to draw media attention toward a sensational row and away from Trump’s policy maneuvers, it seems a remarkably small hill to die on. Why bother?
Trump’s 18-month-old strategy of fighting news media was a winner during the campaign. But governing is different, and it seems likely that he could accomplish more if he did not constantly react to even minor slights from a hostile press corps. When Trump first clinched the Republican nomination we wrote that he had won, and he needed to get over it.
The election demonstrated that the media’s negativity can’t sink him. Trump needs to realize, and perhaps he does, that this negativity will be a constant for as long as he is in the White House. It is now a challenge and irritant for every Republican president irrespective of performance. Trump’s presidency will succeed or fail because of the work he does, the policies he puts in place and how much he stays in touch with the public’s hopes and fears.
His own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, said as much on Sunday when she opined, “I don’t think ultimately presidents are judged by crowd sizes at their inauguration. I think they are judged by their accomplishments.”
Trump’s first executive actions, lightening the burdens of Obamacare and ending taxpayer funding of abortion organizations abroad, among other things, are cause for hope that his administration will take serious and decisive action to undo his predecessor’s militant mismanagement. We hope he focuses on truly towering achievements and does not instead make mountains out of molehills.
