Luke Ford

A friend says: There are three things of particular note today.

The first is that Hawaii’s representative, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard (one of the prettiest members of Congress) met with Trump today at Trump’s invitation. She did not refuse the invitation. She wrote about it in what appears to be a press release, but may be her own words today.

She said she went for the purpose of urging Trump not to listen to the neo cons but to keep the U.S. out of Syria. This is tremendously important as she is a respected Democrat (who is also a major in the Hawaii National Guard who served in Iraq). Her being willingness to meet with Trump because she and he have common ground regarding U.S. foreign interventions, is, as they say, cause for cautious optimism. This will encourage other like minded Democrats to do the same and be a warning to neo cons that if they try to seize the initiative in the Trump administration, they can be marginalized, because Trump will have the backing of sufficient Democrats to offset the neo cons.

The second is floating (actually more than floating) Kris Kobach’s name as director of Homeland Security. He met with Trump today and brought with him plans to reintroduce the sort of screening for potential terrorists that was imposed in 2002. Kobach is very smart and is a hardliner on immigration issues. This has to be encouraging news (unless it turns out to not be the case) for those who think that the nations security require greater vigilance toward Muslims, especially Muslims who come here as immigrants or visitors, those who want our immigration laws enforced for reasons ranging from wanting to uphold the rule of law to those who don’t like the cultural changes made when large number of immigrants come here.

The third is Trump’s off the record meeting with members of the press. The anchors and heads of the Networks and other top executives were at the meeting. It was supposed to be off the record but word has leaked that Trump called the meeting to dress them down and call them liars. This is interesting for two reasons. Yesterday Trump met with Ari Emanual (Rahm’s brother ) who is Trump’s agent for the Apprentice and its spin offs. Since Emanual is quite the power broker in Hollywood which was mostly strongly and vocally opposed to Trump, some may have mistakenly thought this was an overture to get back into Hollywood’s better graces. It looks to me that Trump has taken the position that the main stream press is dying and that he can go over the heads of the press through social media and outlets like Breitbart. Perhaps Steve Bannon advised Trump on this approach. The press doesn’t like being made irrelevant, although in this case they deserve and one can hardly blame Trump as viewing the press collectively (a few sympathetic persons, notwithstanding) as the enemy.

The press may try to take a tough collective line against Trump, but he holds all the cards. If they don’t cooperate with him he can ignore, and that will cost them beaucoup bucks since television (both Cable and Network) news operations bring in much more revenue than they cost to produce. Frankly, without a mea culpa from the press, not that they missed the Trump phenomenon, but admitting they actually advocated unfairly against him and did not fairly cover his substantive policy proposals and in doing so abdicated their responsibilities, along with a commitment to more fairly report the news without favoring one political party or one political position over another, Trump may refuse to have anything to do with them, feeding them news releases and holding interviews only with his favorites. If anyone one on his staff leaks to the press, Trump should fire them immediately. Eventually the press will have to come around. However, if they knuckle under to Trump, even if this is by doing relatively objective reporting, they lose their reputation with Democrats and liberals.

The issue with the Press will be a fun one to watch shake out.