By RaeLi @Adobe Stock
The Trump administration is facing an embarrassing meltdown. Here’s the lowdown:
A journalist was accidentally included in a discussion of Yemen war plans. Two questions come quickly to mind, notes Holman W. Jenkins in the WSJ:
- How did the snafu happen?
- Why were officials using a private app for a top-secret discussion?
Will disgruntled lawmakers call for an investigation? The disgruntled aren’t just Democrats. Many in the GOP have lost some of their “cherished programs and prerogatives.” An investigation would then help gain leverage against Team Trump.
As Mr. Jenkins noted, Donald Trump is much different than a Mitt Romney or Elon Musk. The same is true of the three who cut their teeth in the private sector. Like millions of other Americans raised this way, setbacks can be expected. It’s part of the game, so get used to it. “Roll with the punches” remains sound advice.
Working in the private sector teaches experience, such as losing a big customer or a company’s product that is abruptly neither popular nor viable. What’s that? You want me to lay off how many staff members?
Mr. Jenkins brings up this uncomfortable statistic: “On an average day, 66,000 Americans lose their jobs; 82 businesses file for bankruptcy.”
One big flub Mitt Romney made in 2012 was “off the record,” saying he “didn’t expect the votes of the 47% who pay no income tax or consume public benefits.”
Barack Obama hit Romney hard with ads focused on Bain Capital taking things away: jobs, benefits, and healthcare—no mention of Romney’s governing in Massachusetts or Olympic leadership.
Not only did it put an end to Romney’s presidential hopes, but it also removed “spending control from the national agenda and ushered in the greatest period of debt expansion the U.S. has known since it paid for World War II.”
It’s Dodge or Nothing
Chaos from Mr. Musk would be the worst possible solution, argues Mr. Jenkins, if it weren’t for orderly reforms to be out of reach “thanks to the iron law of concentrated benefits and diffused costs.” Will America be spared a radical, hasty retreat from government spending because the market will no longer buy U.S. government bonds at any price?
All this has been a shot of rejuvenation for one person, the human embodiment of the tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect school of Democratic politics, namely Chuck Schumer. Alas, nothing done by Messrs. Trump and Musk should have you thinking Washington will avoid the greater reckoning when (to predict an early harbinger) waiting lists for Medicare, Medicaid and veterans care suddenly balloon to rival those of Britain’s National Health Service.
But there’s worse. A reactionary press is forgetting that politics continues.
Most of the press, though, couldn’t even say what the Education Department does and yet all know, in its exact present form, we can’t live without it.
President Trump might be sincere about cutting spending. His administration, however, is missing the legislative tools necessary to address the swamp.
It would be shameful to miss the bigger irony here, adds Mr. Jenkins:
The Signal snafu arises over something actually useful in this regard, a Trump initiative to reclaim freedom of the seas from Yemeni insurgents who’ve largely shut down the Suez Canal.
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