How We’ll Cover the Trump Administration
It’s frustrating to be watching from the sidelines now. Here’s what I’d say to the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau — if I were still in the game and the bureau and the company still existed.
To: The Washington Bureau
From: John
In the backwash of President-elect Trump’s first blast of appointments and pronouncements, it’s tempting to extrapolate from that and predict what his administration is going to do.
The growing list of loyalists, lackeys and loggerheads does make two things clear: The White House will be all powerful, and there will be no tolerance for dissent, disagreement or diversity. (We shall see, though, how long the Oval Office will be large enough to house the egos of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.)
Nevertheless, let’s leave the 20,000-foot expert analyses, the guessing games and the prejudgments about people, policies and psychology to others. Our competitors will have to decide how much to pay for access to the President-elect and his puppets. He’s already made it clear that it’s too much, if not for Jeff Bezos, then for us paupers.
Instead — and this is the best analogy my aging brain can come up with — let’s treat the incoming president like a 17-year-old to whom we’ve given the keys to the aging white Chevy Suburban. He now has The Beast fair-and-square, despite that joy ride a few years ago and the fender-bender he had when he was learning to parallel park.
The question now is: What will be do with it? Where will he drive it? Who else will ride with him? Will he try to do donuts with it? How much gas will he burn? Will he let Musk try to make it drive itself?
However, if he takes older folks to medical appointments, impoverished students to school or food to the local pantry, we’ll report that.
The first question is how the incoming administration will be populated. Will Trump now appoint some professionals and policy experts or, as some assume, continue to put subservience first? The fact that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo were kicked off the bus while Marco Rubio, Steven Miller and Kristi Noem were boarding is a powerful clue, but it’s not conclusive.
The important thing now, as it’s been with every administration, is to watch what the new cast and their capo do, for whom and to whom. As we’ve already discussed,
Message to the Media
There already has been a numbing barrage of news media finger-pointing, handwringing, apologizing, navel-gazing and excuse-making for the coverage of this year’s national, state and local elections.
some of our colleagues at KR papers around the country will be watching from the ground up.
We’re going to do the same thing in Washington — report on what the new administration is doing from the bottom up. As we’ve seen, for example in our Iraq reporting and in Tony Capaccio’s coverage of the F-35 and the Ford-class carrier for Bloomberg, the folks closest to the ground usually know more than their superiors at headquarters do or will acknowledge. The Russians’ T-90 tanks might look great in their shiny reactive armor parading through Red Square, but the mechanics who maintain them and their record in Ukraine paint a less flattering picture.
Our job is to find the mechanics in the federal government’s basement. If the administration’s top-down dictation sow departures, disaffection and dissent, that could make our job easier.
Let’s start with issues closest to home — defense spending, employment, health, climate/environment, law enforcement, the federal budget and the deficit.
One priority will be looking to see if there are any correlations between financial and political support for Trump and the issuance or cancellation of federal contracts, grants and programs. Another, given assorted early vows, will be tracking the activities, targets and motives of Trump’s Justice Department.
The best assessments of the costs of the new administration’s actions and rhetoric will come from the bottom up. Will they provoke an exodus of knowledge, experience and talent? The new political appointees probably won’t want to talk about that any more than they have in previous administrations. Some of the folks whose friends and colleagues are forced out might.
It hasn’t been reported yet, but some high-ranking officials are looking for places at home or abroad to stash valuable professional staffers where they might be able to avoid the Trump White House’s surveillance. Many other veteran officials are debating whether to resign now and look for work ahead of the expected stampede or to, as one of my former graduate students at Georgetown put it: “See if I can tough it out until there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Next, will the new administration waste millions or more on useless or overpriced programs from companies that have supported Trump? Will it back some worthwhile new programs and eliminate some of the waste, fraud and abuse inherited from previous administrations, as Trump has promised?
The two are not mutually exclusive, and our credibility will rest not only on exposing waste, fraud and abuse, but also on giving credit where it’s due.
As our boss Clark Hoyt points out, one element is common to every front — government statistics. We need to find folks who’ll tell us if they’re under pressure to cook the books (https://www.propublica.org/article/epa-scientists-faced-retaliation-after-finding-harm-from-chemicals), starting with the federal deficit and including unemployment rates, public health (especially if fluoride, Medicaid and vaccines do vanish), the costs of new tariffs and climate change. Will there be any relationships, for example, between emergency relief and infrastructure support and state or local partisan politics?
Somewhere in the bowels of every agency and department are public servants who can tell us if the administration is redrawing financial maps the way Trump took a marker and redirected a hurricane during his first administration.
The foreign policy front is farther from home for most Americans, but the same is true of intelligence and military assessments, and as we know, the returning president doesn’t much like the intelligence community, especially if it tries to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. Exhibit A: Evidence of Russian meddling in U.S. and other elections.
https://johnwalcott.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/151140776?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
For example, ask if Trump has been briefed on the probable effects of canceling aid to Ukraine, bowing out of NATO, erecting tariff barriers or cutting aid to South Korea and Taiwan, and how he responded.
The Kremlin’s immediate shots across Trump’s bow are reminders of a question that’s been lurking since at least 2016: Does Putin have something on the incoming president? If so, are the photos of his wife a clue? Could debts disgorged by Deutsche Bank and others have been lapped up by VEB, Rosbank and by oligarchs’ accounts in Cyprus, the Caymans and elsewhere?
Doing this could come at a price beyond being shut out of briefings and badmouthed on X. Please report any warnings, threats or other attempts at intimidation to our librarian Tish Wells, who’ll catalog them. If you’re called a traitor, especially if this time it’s not spelled “trader”, as it was in an email to Jon Landay and Warren Strobel by someone who didn’t like their bottom-up Iraq reporting, remember that’s true only if you believe that l’état c’est Trump.
If we’re as well sourced as we need to be at Justice, the FBI and elsewhere — including the IRS — we might even get a heads-up about things coming our way.
If in the end it turns out that we are on the highway to hell,
we need to watch for that white Suburban.
Above all, though, remember once again that we don’t report for the people who make policies. We report for the people who feel their effects.