Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Twitter Edition, CONt. (AKA The Trump Populism CON, CONt. Part 2)

UPDATE:  Advice The Donald will never follow:  "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."

From Proverbs 17:28: "Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."

"Increasingly . . . Trump’s bloody-minded jihad against the NFL must be seen as an attempt to distract from something far more dangerous to Trump: the malfeasance of his Cabinet and White House staff.

Trump loves to recall his presidential campaign, so he should remember that he campaigned on two themes: draining the swamp and Hillary Clinton’s sense of entitlement. His administration was ostensibly going to be above the cozy perquisites of power of previous administrations. Team Trump would swear off the arbitrary application of rules to others but not to themselves. Trump’s inaugural address blasted how 'The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,' and declared: 'January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.'

Let’s just review how this populist project has been going in the past two weeks:

    Politico has reported on Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s love affair with chartered planes. This apparently started due to a canceled commercial flight because of inclement weather, but grew to be such a habit that Price charted a plane to fly from Dulles International Airport to Philadelphia. Which is nuts. The reports are so bad that Price was forced to acknowledge that “the optics in some of this don’t look good” and suspend the practice. Price’s allergy to commercial travel is so bad that even this White House is distancing itself.

    Price is hardly the only Cabinet official to demand travel perquisites. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is being investigated for using a government plane to fly to Fort Knox to possibly obtain a primo view of last month’s solar eclipse. Mnuchin also started the paperwork to request a military plane to fly him to Europe for his honeymoon. He also used a government plane to fly from New York back to Washington after Trump’s news conference at Trump Tower. Mnuchin has insisted that he needed these aircraft for secure national security communications. As a former Treasury employee, let’s just say that I doubt that assertion. Oh, and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is facing a similar investigation into his frequent travel back to his home state of Oklahoma.

    We learned from Politico that Jared Kushner set up a private email account and occasionally used that account to conduct official business with other White House officials. We learned from Newsweek that Ivanka Trump did the same thing. And then the New York Times reported that at least six White House staffers did something similar. That includes this priceless anecdote: “Most of Mr. Trump’s aides used popular commercial email services like Gmail. Mr. Kushner created a domain, IJKFamily.com, in December to host his family’s personal email.”

So, to sum up: Trump’s Cabinet officers sure seem to be enjoying the perquisites of power, and the Trump White House thinks that the rules do not apply to them in the same way they claimed the rules did not apply to the Clintons. . .

During the transition there were fierce debates among journalists about how to cover Trump’s Twitter feed. Politico’s Jack Shafer argued that it was a massive misdirection engine from real stories. Others argued that it would be inappropriate to ignore them. Eight months into his administration, I think the epiphany should be obvious to everyone. Sure, maybe Trump is trying to pick and choose Twitter fights that he thinks he can win. However, there is too much malfeasance and incompetency to deflect.

If I were Trump I would be tweeting about the NFL, too. I would be tweeting about anything that distracted people from my administration, which has accomplished nothing populist in its first eight months. But no Twitter account, no matter how provocative, can distract from the entitled, God-awful mess that is Trump’s presidency."

Read the Washington Post, The president is going to need a bigger Twitter account.