How Trump’s cabinet is tricking the media
While most of the national media have been fixated on President Trump’s rants and tweet storms, his cabinet is enacting serious policy changes away from the glare of television cameras and with little scrutiny from most journalists.
And that’s by design, according to Yahoo News correspondent Alexander Nazaryan, who sat down with CNN’s Brian Stelter for this week’s Reliable Sources podcast to talk about his new book “The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington.”
Listen to the whole podcast here:
The book title borrows from a phrase that Trump likes to use when he talks about recruiting for his cabinet. “We have to get the best people,” Trump said when he was asked about staffing in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The “best people” that Trump has enlisted to fill his cabinet are employing an unusual strategy to get work done: keeping the media focused squarely on Trump’s tweets.
Nazaryan said one of the book’s anonymous sources told him, “What you guys thought was chaos, what you thought was madness, was actually us using the president well.” In other words, they are using Trump’s unpredictable behavior as cover for implementing conservative policies for the country.
“How could you possibly worry about what was happening in the Department of Labor or Education when you had a president who was tweeting about being wiretapped by the Obama DOJ?” Nazaryan asked Stelter.
The attention Trump gains for his tweets distracts the media and voters from the “actual work” his cabinet is doing, Nazaryan said. According to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who spoke to Nazaryan for the book, the West Wing and chief of staff suite “would assault the media with just a barrage of things every single day and that would overwhelm us.”
The result? “They would be able to get more through because the more they throw at us, the less of it we would be able to cover substantively,” Nazaryan said.
Not all news outlets and journalists are missing the mark, however. Nazaryan counts the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico as news organizations that are doing a good job at scrutinizing government agencies. He singled out Eric Lipton at the Times and the Post’s Lisa Rein as reporters who have “cover[ed] these less glamorous parts of Washington just incredibly well.”
So what would Nazaryan do differently if he was in charge of his own newsroom?
“I would focus less on Trump himself,” he said. “I would dedicate more staff to, not just the agencies, but to the officials in the White House who are making policy decisions.”
