Donald Trump’s raging insecurity is once again oozing out of his White House press office, this time in a press email with the subject “Praise For President Trump's Bold Action.”
The email is an assembly of press clips and headlines praising—or seeming to praise—Trump’s first days in office. Reading the email, you wouldn’t know that behind the headline “What Trump got right on day 1: The jobs agenda,” the Chicago Tribune (a traditionally conservative newspaper) sprinkled its editorial with mentions of Trump’s disastrous performance at the CIA Saturday, with the observation that “caveats abound” on Trump’s jobs agenda, and that its conclusion includes that “Trump's prickly temperament — his thin skin, especially — has already been a distraction.”
It’s not surprising that praise from the likes of Sean Hannity, Sen. Ted Cruz, and the Daily Signal is more unstinting.
But let’s talk about the form of this email. This is not the kind of email the White House is supposed to be sending out. This is the kind of email you get from a campaign or a political party. The Obama White House press office, anyway, sent out a dry series of daily guidances, readouts of calls with foreign leaders, transcriptions of public remarks, and announcements of appointments or executive orders. Not “OMG Prez Obama is teh greatest you guys!!!” It was a conduit for official information, not campaigning. That’s not to say the Obama administration didn’t push out its view of the world, it just didn’t blast it out from the White House press office in such a naked, desperate form.
Then again, Obama’s press office didn’t have a raging egomaniac glowering at it, demanding to know why it wasn’t getting the media to report “alternative facts” as reality.