Trump is Playing with the Press

Trump is Playing with the Press

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today

He's gaslighting them and they fall for it every time.

Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.

The first thing to understand is that one of the changes going on with Trump generally is the renegotiation of various post-World War II institutional arrangements. One of those is the institutional arrangement involving the press and the White House. For decades, the press got special status because it was seen as both powerful and institutionally responsible. (And, of course, allied with the Democrats, who were mostly in charge of setting up those postwar institutional arrangements). Press quarters inside the White House and daily press briefings made it easy for everyone to get together on the story of the day.

Now those things have changed. If the press were powerful, it would have beaten Trump. If it were responsible, it wouldn’t be running away with fake news whenever it sees a chance to run something damaging to Trump. And, of course, there’s no alliance between Trump and the media, as there was with Obama.

So things will change. The press’s “insider” status — which it cherishes — is going to fade, with Trump’s press people even talking about moving them out of the White House entirely, and ignoring their existing pecking order in press conferences. (This is producing waves of status anxiety, as are many other Trump-induced institutional changes). And, having abandoned, quite openly, any pretense of objectivity and neutrality in the election, the press is going to be treated as an enemy by the Trump administration until further notice.

In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).

Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.

They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control. As Richard Fernandez writes on Facebook, they think he’s dumb because they think he has lousy taste, but there are a lot of scarily competent guys out there in the world who like white and gold furniture. And, I should note, Trump has more media experience than probably 99% of the people covering him. (As Obama operative Ben Rhodes gloated with regard to selling a dishonest story on the Iran deal, the average reporter the Obama White House dealt with “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” In Rhodes’ words, “they literally know nothing.”)

If you read Don Surber’s election book, Trump the Press, it becomes pretty obvious that the press hasn’t been very good at understanding Trump’s strategies, or at responding to them. So far, there’s no sign of that changing as we move from the Trump campaign to the Trump administration.

So what should the press do? It can keep responding the way it has responded so far, or it can change its approach. But the latter may require more self-discipline than it’s got.

The killer counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging. The counter-move is to bolster its own trustworthiness by acting (and being) more neutral and sober, and by being more trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work, and any actual dirt they found on him would do actual damage. He’s betting on the press being insufficiently mature and self-controlled to manage that. So far, his bet is paying off.

That’s too bad. If we had a better press, we’d be much better off as a nation, and Trump’s strategy of capitalizing on the press’s flaws is good for Trump, but will probably make that problem worse, if such a thing is possible. But the truth is, we don’t have a better press. And as long as the press is mindlessly partisan and bereft of self-discipline, capitalizing on that is just good politics.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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Mike Walker, new book

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired) new book

The 1929 Sino-Soviet War: The War Nobody Knew

(Modern War Studies) 

by Michael Walker 

For seven weeks in 1929, the Republic of China and the Soviet Union battled in Manchuria over control of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. It was the largest military clash between China and a Western power ever fought on Chinese soil, involving more that a quarter million combatants. Michael M. Walker’s The 1929 Sino-Soviet War is the first full account of what UPI’s Moscow correspondent called “the war nobody knew”—a “limited modern war” that destabilized the region's balance of power, altered East Asian history, and sent grim reverberations through a global community giving lip service to demilitarizing in the wake of World War I.

Walker locates the roots of the conflict in miscalculations by Chiang Kai-shek and Chang Hsueh-liang about the Soviets’ political and military power—flawed assessments that prompted China’s attempt to reassert full authority over the CER. The Soviets, on the other hand, were dominated by a Stalin eager to flex some military muscle and thoroughly convinced that war would win much more than petty negotiations. This was in fact, Walker shows, a watershed moment for Stalin, his regime, and his still young and untested military, disproving the assumption that the Red Army was incapable of fighting a modern war. By contrast, the outcome revealed how unprepared the Chinese military forces were to fight either the Red Army or the Imperial Japanese Army, their other primary regional competitor. And yet, while the Chinese commanders proved weak, Walker sees in the toughness of the overmatched infantry a hint of the rising nationalism that would transform China’s troops from a mercenary army into a formidable professional force, with powerful implications for an overconfident Japanese Imperial Army in 1937.

Using Russian, Chinese, and Japanese sources, as well as declassified US military reports, Walker deftly details the war from its onset through major military operations to its aftermath, giving the first clear and complete account of a little known but profoundly consequential clash of great powers between the World Wars.

Available  – January 27, 2017 from Amazon

Reviews...

“In telling the story of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Walker takes a wide-ranging approach that encompasses international politics of the region between China, Japan, and the USSR while simultaneously providing a wealth of detail on the domestic politics affecting decision-making. The military aspects of the war are equally thoroughly documented from the quality of leadership, to the tactics and technology that determined the outcome. This work will be the standard for a long time to come.”—Roger R. Reese, author of Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II

 

“Long overlooked as inconsequential, the 1929 Sino-Soviet War in fact had profound implications for China, Japan, the Soviet Union and the international order in East Asia. Drawing upon trends in international and world history, Michael M. Walker breathes new life into the study of this war, offering a fluid narrative and detailed analysis of the political, military, and diplomatic aspects of the conflict. In doing so, he reveals the complexity and consequence of ‘the war nobody knew.’“—Peter Worthing, author of General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China

 

“This unprecedented, credible, and interesting study of the twentieth century’s most obscure war highlights the complexity inherent in the prolonged struggle for political dominance in northeastern Asia.” —David M. Glantz, author of The Stalingrad Trilogy

 

“The 1929 Sino-Soviet war over control of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria is perhaps the least studied 20th century conflict even while being one of the most important. As detailed by Michael Walker in his ground-breaking monograph, one immediate result of China’s defeat was Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and its creation the next year of the Manchukuo puppet state, widely seen as the opening salvo in the Pacific War.”—Bruce Elleman, William V. Pratt Professor of International History US Naval War College

A Disaster He's Proud Of

A Disaster He's Proud Of

Lee Smith, Weekly Standard

The Obama chapter in American foreign policy ends like the climax of an action movie—with a fireball growing in the distance and filling the screen as a man in silhouette approaches in slow motion and then veers off camera. Barack Obama has set the Middle East on fire, and now it's spreading.

The Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran has emboldened the world's leading state sponsor of terror, which now makes war openly in four Arab states (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen) and is a growing threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia. The deal with Tehran that Obama boasts of as his signature foreign policy initiative guarantees, as the president himself acknowledged, that Iran will have an industrial-scale nuclear weapons program within 15 years.

After a 40-year absence from the Middle East, Russia has returned to the region, where it bombs Syria's schools and hospitals as America and Europe watch helplessly. Washington's traditional regional allies are scrambling to adjust to the new reality, which for the likes of Israel, Jordan, and Turkey means an opportunistic power on their borders that is allied with their existential enemies.

For Europe, the millions seeking refuge from the conflagration are agents of potential instability on the continent in the years to come; some in their midst are terrorists plain and simple. In just four years, or one presidential term, a civil uprising that started in Syria became a great Middle Eastern war over a host of sectarian, religious, and political hostilities dating back centuries.

Critics and even admirers of the president say that Syria will be a stain on his record. But that's not how Obama sees it. The death and suffering of so many undoubtedly pains him, as he says. He says he wonders if he could have done anything else. Of course he could have, but he believed he had better reasons not to.

There is probably no other president in the post-World War II period who would not have committed significant resources to toppling Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, by 2013, all of Obama's national security cabinet advised him to support the rebels. They believed that the United States had, first, a stake in helping to end a humanitarian catastrophe and, no less important, a vital interest in preserving a 70-year-old order that the conflict threatened to undo.

America's Cold War strategy was relatively simple in outline: We would preserve stability on the European continent, contain Moscow, and protect the resource-rich Persian Gulf, which ensured the free flow of trade on which American prosperity depended. Obama disregarded those principles. Assad's war sent millions to a quickly overwhelmed Europe. Putin's gambit in Syria eliminated Israel's air superiority in the eastern Mediterranean and positioned Russia on NATO's southern border. Iran's harassment of the U.S. Navy in the Gulf signaled to the oil-producing Arab states that since the nuclear deal was more important to Obama than American prestige and the safety of American servicemen and women, they were on their own.

By normal bipartisan American standards, Obama's foreign policy record is disastrous. But that's not how he sees it. For Obama and his closest aides, the last seven years represent a revolution, a transformative period in American foreign policy engineered by a transformative figure.

Obama's foreign policy issued in part from his understanding of global realities but more from his interpretation of the American character. He believed that Americans tend to make a mess of things around the world. Obama is like a narrator in a Graham Greene novel; in our relations with the rest of humanity, as he sees it, we are 300 million naïfs abroad, whose intentions may be good but who lack the tragic sense that the rest of the world feels in its bones. Americans, until Obama came along, had been in the grip of a triumphalist fantasy—American exceptionalism—thinking there was nothing wrong with the world that couldn't be fixed by pointing our guns at it. A shoot-first America was especially dangerous in the conflict-prone Middle East, where everything looks like a nail to a nation that thinks it's a hammer. For Obama, it was vitally important to get the country he was elected to lead off of what he called a "perpetual war footing."

The sticking point for Obama was that the character of the American people determines the nature of our foreign policy and the establishment that embodies and implements it. In other words, almost everyone around him, even his own cabinet officials, was part of the problem. Of course Leon Panetta and David Petraeus and Hillary Clinton would argue that he should back the Syrian rebels and obviously John Kerry would think he should hit Assad for crossing the red line that Obama himself had drawn against the use of chemical weapons. "The Blob," as Obama lieutenant Ben Rhodes called the Washington policy establishment, is incapable of thinking anything else.

"There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow," Obama told the Atlantic magazine. "It's a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses."

As Obama explained, when he declined to hit Assad for crossing the red line, he tore up the playbook. It not only liberated Obama but was a first step in freeing America from its dangerous habit of mind. Whenever that primordial lizard brain surfaced again to argue for force, Obama pushed back. Indeed, this White House argued not that the United States wouldn't or shouldn't do things but that it couldn't do them.

Sure, it would be great to protect Syrian civilians from Assad and Putin. But Russia's air defense systems are really powerful, so we can't set up no-fly zones to protect them. Obviously the Pentagon has solutions for Russian systems such as the S-300—like hitting their radar, command-and-control facilities, or missile batteries—in order to set up a no-fly zone. But Obama wanted America to get used to not thinking of doing things he believed we shouldn't do.

So there was nothing to be done about the war in Syria. And there was nothing to be done about Iran's nuclear weapons program except sign an imperfect deal, because the only other choice was war. There was nothing to be done about Putin when his soldiers seized Crimea, then Donbas, then brought down a passenger jet over Ukraine, or when he sheltered Edward Snowden and had his secret police beat up an American diplomat.

Obama's foreign policy, in the end, was not primarily about the rest of the world—it was about transforming the character of America. So where are we eight years on? Gelded, as he intended.

Consider that for several months now, the country has been consumed with reports of Putin's cyberwar against American political institutions. It's become embarrassing to watch this frenzied chorus of politicians and the press beating their chests and rending their clothes for fear that Putin has made us all vulnerable—as if America were some post-Soviet backwater incapable of taking care of its own business, quietly and with dispatch. America before Obama knew how to take care of itself in such confrontations. Let's hope we can recover that confidence.