From the beginning of the Trump administration, approximately 100 years ago but who's counting, Team Trump has been rolling out "theme" weeks devoted to special topics that Donald Trump wants to pretend he cares about and Donald Trump's team wants to pretend they have ideas on. You can measure the success of this branding by asking how many of these themes you yourself, a politically savvy administration-watcher, recall. There was "Infrastructure Week." There may have been a Technology Week, I think? The others are fuzzier, so we'll call them Child Labor Week, and Pay No Attention To The Polls Week, and Everybody Gets A Panda Week.
Each week consists of the same, to use the technical term, crapola. The theme is announced. The entire collected expertise of the Trump White House is devoted to making a short semi-literate bullet-pointed list about how to make the current thing More Awesome. There are several photo-op meetings with business friends of the administration to talk about the thing. Jared Kushner is summoned to give a book report for some reason. And then, apparently, nobody ever talks about it again and the team sprints on to "solving" the next thing.
This week's theme is "Made in America." That's right, the week after we learned that the Donald Trump campaign was shipping in Russian parts to help craft his victory is devoted to making things here; it consists of the usual meetings and weird announcements seemingly structured to making Donald feel better about himself.
The president plans to issue a declaration Wednesday and deliver remarks on the importance of making things in the United States. And Saturday, Trump will travel to Norfolk to attend the commissioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first in the Navy’s new class of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
If he's bragging that under a Trump administration we'll be making our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers ourselves, well, touché. But you can tell that even the national press itself is getting a bit tired of these weekly smoke grenades because right there in the press report dutifully announcing Made in America week, the Washington Post wastes no time in throwing some shade:
Asked at Sunday’s briefing whether “Made in America” week would include a commitment from the Trump Organization or Ivanka Trump’s company to make more of their products in the United States, Ferré told reporters, “We’ll get back to you on that.”
In fact, Made in America week seems to have been crafted for the singular purpose of giving all of America's media outlets a fresh chance to mock the Trump family's notorious inability to make their products in America. We know the White House brain trust has been preoccupied as of late, but it still seems like they perhaps ought to have better thought this one through.