There is a wonderful little public service performed at the end of each workweek by the Associated Press (AP) as they call around and gather information on who the scheduled guests are for the Big Five Sunday News Shows. This is a venerable political tradition begun in the United States by Meet the Press, the septuagenarian granddaddy of all the Sunday morning news and opinion shows (since 1947, virtually as old as American broadcast television itself).
Over the decades Americans, at the end of one week and the dawning of the next, tune in to see movers & shakers, spin doctors and other persons of interest justify themselves, try to explain their way out of a hole or holes, or shape the public narrative for the informational jolts and shocks to come.
Here is the briefest summary of the current main players:
A Sunday morning talk show is a television program with a news/talk/public affairs-hybrid format that is broadcast on Sunday mornings. This type of program originated in the United States, and has since been used in other countries. Wikipedia
- Fox: Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace
- ABC: This Week with George Stephanopoulos
- CBS: Face the Nation with John Dickerson
- NBC: Meet the Press with Chuck Todd
- CNN: State of the Union with Jake Tapper
Everybody with an interest in current political events loves them, or at least monitors them via direct viewing, internet, print and social media filters..
This list is not in prestige order. Meet the Press is at the top of the heap and was the original exemplar of the genre. Next come CBS and ABC for their legendary news division history (Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, etc.) and as the third major national network respectively. Thirty plus years ago after CNN’s 24-hour all news network rose to prominence they joined the parade. The newest member (1996) is Fox News, thanks to the late Roger Ailes, which has prospered as the right wing alternate news and views haven. Fox News is, of course, the favorite and enthusiastic enabler for DJT, Trump.45.
As of Friday Trump.45’s rolling airborne version of Bongo Long’s Traveling All Star Dog & Pony Show* went wheels up on a nine day foreign jaunt to make the world right, Unite the Muslims without Lecturing, break the back of ISIS, defeat Iran, sell a few tens of billions of lethal arms to procure peace in our lifetimes, collect some gold medal bling, fake a traditional folk sword dance, entertain the Trumpster’s most favorite children and aides with special sightseeing treats, and otherwise duck the last two weeks of the Washington national security story that will not die (Flynn, Russia, and the FBI), henceforth to be know forevermore as the FRF Fake News Scandal.
Given the rocky, bumpy, grumpy climate at home for the last couple of weeks, it is fair to ask while Trump is gone, who’s left behind minding the store. One way of peeling that onion is to ask who is representing the absolutely fabulous and correct Administration positions on matters political while Trump.45 himself is off in the dessert, and the real Donald Trump Twit channel seems to be having Wi-Fi connection problems, with only intermittent service.
We will get to the lucky ones who have been chosen to participate in the traveling center of American political power in a bit.
Thanks to AP’s latest public contribution for this weekend, here is the schedule for the Big Five Sunday news shows for May 21, 2017:
ABC’s “This Week”: White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster will be on the show, as will the top lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee – Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) will also make an appearance.
CBS’s “Face the Nation”: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is set to appear. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will also be on.
“Fox News Sunday”: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will join the show from Riyadh. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will make an appearance.
CNN’s “State of the Union”: Rubio is set to appear. Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, will also be on the show, as will Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).
Just to confirm this information for accuracy’s sake, here is a second bite of the scheduling apple, to ensure we haven’t missed anything significant.
ABC’s “This Week” — President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster; Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Elijah Cummings, D-Md.; Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb.
NBC’s “Meet the Press” — Pre-empted by English Premier League soccer coverage
CBS’ ”Face the Nation” — Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
CNN’s “State of the Union” — Rubio; Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.
“Fox News Sunday” — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Comparing the listings one on one, show by show, by inspection we see no discrepancies. OK, we have good data to work from.
To be honest, the schedule seems more than a bit light on the guest front: we have 4 (ABC), 2 )CBS), 2 (Fox News), 2 (CNN), and none (NBC), a grand total of just 10 guests on five shows, an anemic two per show for a hot news week.
We have in this august collection eight elected politicians: four senators (3 Republicans, 1 Democrat), and four Representatives (2 Republicans and 2 Democrats). An over weighted Republican tally, but no real surprise on that score.
We also have two whole representatives from the Trump.45 Administration, both quite senior: National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. I didn’t watch the shows live, so I’m not certain but the descriptions imply that the McMaster segment was recorded on tape in Saudi Arabia, while Tillerson was live from the desert thanks to the miracles of modern satellite telecommunications technology.
Again, only two official Trumpeteers in a full Sunday schedule, which is a bit thin. And not a single senior advisor, surrogate, or adult left in Washington and in temporary charge of White House communications locally to show the flag on Sunday TV..
Let us not forget that since Trump.45 is out of town, occupied and tired, we don’t have the Boss contributing his usual flair and flurry. And then of course Bill O’Reilly’s propaganda slot has gone dark. Or maybe someone finally got through to the Big Man that during the painful nine days out of the country he would just be better off keeping his trap shut so he doesn’t step all over the beautiful visuals of his royal welcome to Saudi Arabia, and the hoped for gems to come later in the week.
That strategy wouldn’t work at home, but maybe the advice will stick in foreign climes.
Or maybe those few left behind are not considered loyal enough or smart enough lately to go and aggressively promote and defend the President’s bold vision, without close immediate supervision.
The next thing to notice this week is the most honored of the Big Five, NBC’s Meet the Press is missing from the list.. That omission is not a typo, nor is it a common absence. NBC has paid its electric bills and is still on the air. However, they have chosen this fraught week to substitute major sports programming for the English Premier Soccer League. Now football (soccer, as the rest of the World outside the US knows the game) is a very big sport indeed. And the Premier League is a pretty big deal within the soccer universe, though not anything near as important as say the World Cup, but maybe more prestigious than the Olympics.
But a major draw for US sports fans on Sunday mid-morning it is generally not. Despite the fact that, for example, I heard in passing from the Saudi commentator leading up t Trump;45’s Sunday Muslim speech that the Saudis had pulled out all the stops and invited the New York Cosmos (retooled since 2013) to attend for a match against a Saudi team as part of the festivities. I’m not sure Trump.45 has ever attended a soccer match, and there is no indication he will make it to the stadium for this one.
What is more striking is that (maybe I missed it) but the news of the Cosmos making a soccer exhibition trip this weekend to Saudi Arabia didn’t make the usual American national news in the lead-up to Trump.45’s departure. Or perhaps I jus plain missed it, not following enough sports channels. My bad: here’s the dope on the exhibition match.
Maybe NBC is on to something, even though the Cosmos (we support American athletes and sports teams) wouldn’t stand a serious chance against any of the elite Premier League teams. I doubt their club ownership would even deign to schedule a match in front of discerning football fans in Europe.
But I digress.
If the lights weren’t exactly out in the Sunday News studies, the fare was still light diet and non-rib sticking. This may have been a good time to be left at home and in relative peace in the White House bunker. A break from the rock ’em, sock ’em last 14 days which now seem like 6 months of drama compressed inyo 14 daily bombs, traps and surprises. Everybody could use a few days to come down off the adrenalin fight or flight reaction.
So, with this background, who was left behind to mind the domestic arm of the Trump.45 revolution while the Boss and lucky boys and girls were off globe trotting for power and influence, with a bit o pomp and circumstance tossed in for jollies.
The Crew Trump.45 Left Behind
Thanks to Trump.45’s impromptu, impetuous and chaotic management style this White House has been a grim staff battleground from nearly the onset. Trump.45 prizes personal fealty nearly above all else, including experience in governing and educational training. Most of his closest inner circle brought down to Washington are governmental rookies, and of course their early work has shown this is neon bright fashion.
The collective attitude is little different than Trump.45’s own naïve stupefying notions of how fall off the log easy his job was going to be. Say the word: ObamaCare goes away. Say the word: The Russia investigation goes away. Say the word: the Border Wall is funded and built. Say the word: Michael Flynn gets a clear personnel Bill of Health and Declaration of Innocence. Part of Trump.45’s problem is that there is no one senior enough or loyal enough to tell him off when he pops out a particularly outrageous or incompetent idea off the cuff and in the heat of the moment.
His council of outside advisors; Murdoch, Icahn, Reddy, etc., are all rich white men with business experience that doesn’t translate well into governance practicalities. His second tier circle of politically experienced whisperers like Christie, Giuliani, and Gingrich are well past their sell by dates, and have lost more than a step or two in the sagacity of their advice
So, Trump.45 is constrained to rely in his own inexperienced gut reactions to weigh the advice he receives from his inner cadre, inexperienced as they are at governing on the national stage. Talk about a steep and winding learning curve.
After six months of transition and early attempts to govern, the inner circle names we have comes to know best are Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, and Sean Spicer. Add to the mix Stephen Miller, Gary Cohn, and Keith Shiller (Oval Office Operations Director).
In the communications realm we have Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hope Hicks, late Trump team addition communications director Michael Dubke, Michael Anton (NSC Spokesman), and Dan Scavino (Social Media Director). Of course there is Ivanka for advisor family ties and stabilizing moderation. The White House counsel Don McGhan is part of the core team.
On the national security front we are already looking at the second generation of principal and deputy selectees in H.R. McMaster and Dina Powell, who have replaced the disgraced (but good man who has done nothing wrong, Mike Flynn)_ and the departed K.T. McFarland, late of Fox. So, for the senior White House staff side of things, the usual core is about 17 of the best known names and faces.
Who was selected for a prime prize seat on Air Force One as it left the United States for the first time travel overseas, Trump.45 aboard:
Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, Spicer, Shiller, Miller, Scavino, Huckabee Sanders, Hicks, Cohn, McMaster, Powell, Anton, and Ivanka. Fourteen of the Blessed High Ranking Staffers of the Inner Circle. A pure Bakers Dozen plus one.
Who was left behind idle, out of the mix: Kellyanne, Michael Dubke, and the lawyer McGhan.
Also on the travel manifest were SOS Rex Tillerson, and Wilber Ross (Commerce and fellow billionaire) of the Cabinet, Israel Advisor Jason Greenblatt (former Trump Organization executive), Joe Hagin (White House Chief of Staff for Operations), First Lady (Third Wife) Melania, as well as the Big Dog his own self.
Six more principals to make a critical total of 20 most serious passengers.
I have tried to make this listing complete, drawing from multiple sources, but who can ever be sure in the fog of smoke and mirrors that passes for transparency in this Administration.
The Traveling With Trump.45 In Crowd
What to make of the ins?
The President and First Lady, two highly connected family nepotism choices in Ivanka and her spouse, three Cabinet rank officials (two with Senate confirmation, and one appointed), seven senior level advisors and political aides, five PR and communications folks, one operations guy, and a dogged loyal personal aide. (There is one role double counted above: Kushner as both advisor and nepotistic beneficiary).
Trump.45 has been on the personnel lean side since the very beginning of his quest. He ran his campaign with bare bones staffing, partly because he is cheap, partly because he deliberately hacked off most of the experienced Republican staffers and senior managers who might have chosen to work for a President to Be, and perhaps mostly because he insists on paranoid levels of personal loyalty and non-criticism from anyone circling anywhere near his orbit that he finds out about, thus drastically trimming the applicant pool.
This is demonstrated on a daily basis even though now he has more than 500 senior most job positions to fill, and another 4,000 or so jobs he or his cabinet officers must nominate for confirmation by the Senate. The useful life of his Federal agency temporary landing team hit squads is rapidly expiring, and the pace of filling properly vetted and approved permanent job candidates is proceeding at probably the slowest pace since the last Ice Age.
Of curse, his crack PR teams proclaim this performance as a benefit to America, so Trump.45 gets it right, and chooses only the Best and the Brightest, except when he decides to announce the entire personnel process is moving along quite smartly, and in this as in all other things, Trump.45 is the best Presidential manager since sliced bread was invented or Abraham Lincoln occupied the Oval Office..
Never mind about Flynn and McFarland, the FBI background nixing of his original digital IT guy, the withdrawal sans confirmation of his first Labor Secretary, his drop out of all of his first nominees for Secretaries of the Army (times 2) and Navy, and the most recent skedaddle of the nominated and half way vetted Treasury Number 2. You can add the lack of a confirmed Number 2 at State, Defense, and the missing Number 2 at Justice, until April 25 (and Rosenstein has already had to appoint a Special Prosecutor to save his own bacon).
The list of missing in action senior jobs is as long as your arm and the pace of serious work not accomplished shows the problem in stark relief, however confortable Trump.45 may be in his own skin and timetable rhythms.
Given his deep personal proclivities, including such past grandiose boastful statements that Trump could comfortably do the job of Press Secretary and Trade Representative, along with being President, for that matter while hosting a new Presidential version of the Apprentice, without breaking a sweat and in better fashion than anybody on the horizon, it is virtually a given that his core staff is lean to the point of emaciation.
That being the case, President Trump may very well feel he can run the whole country with his Blessed Crew of around 30 key folks. Add in a Defense Secretary, the Attorney General, maybe the Homeland Security dude, and reluctantly perhaps a White House lawyer as a necessary evil, and you pretty much have a lean mean, self sustaining, fully capable American government with a total of about 30 people, along with some contractors who know how to take orders to sweat the small stuff. Now that’s a concept Grover Norquist can rally behind.
Americans who pay 2.1 million federal employees to try and deliver critical services might be surprised to hear this, but facts is facts, Trump.45 would never lie to you. And the dream prospect would seen sweet indeed, until the Social Security checks didn’t come, airplanes started crashing, the military didn’t get paid, there was no one to watch the Border and keep out the Mexicans and bad hombres, and other such inconveniences. At which point, Trump.45 could earnestly explain to everyone that it was all Obama’s fault for not being a good manger and getting the country in a deep, deep hole to begin with.
So there.
The dream lives and I hope the President has a fruitful seven more days of foreign travel to match the undeniable success of his greeting in Saudi Arabia. Things may not go quite so smoothly at the Vatican or in Europe, but after all the Pope doesn’t really want $5 billion In high tech weapons, and European leaders may not share Trump.45’s enthusiasm for informing Muslims about how to behave and what to do, while simultaneously not lecturing them, as he promised at the Arab Summit on Sunday.
Given the fact that the leaders of NATO have had to dumb down the briefings, shorten the Agenda, and simplify presentations to accommodate Trump.45’s various attention deficits, the hoped for meeting of the minds is likely to take more than a day or two to develop a proper head of steam.
Maybe Trump.45 can take a patience pill to ease the tension.
Regardless, when he returns to the US next weekend, perhaps deprived by then of two consecutive weeks of his satisfying golfing pressure release, he is likely to walk straight into another batch of Fake News stories about FRF Fake News nonsense.
He will have to rekindle the fabulous momentum aimed at a quick pick for the new and improved FBI director Perhaps after his visit to the political necropolis to catch superannuated Joe Lieberman and the genera reaction to this pitiful trial balloon has cooled his ardor, Trump.45 will will launch another massive PR campaign so that people pay proper homage to the obvious wisdom of Trump.45’s personnel inspirations.
We shall see shortly.
Meanwhile the Blessed Crew will be back on the ground in Washington refreshed, stoked, and ready to run the country lean and mean.
Selected Sources on Trump.45 Senior Staffing:
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-fg-trump-trip-20170521-story.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Advisor_to_the_President_of_the_United_States
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/07/politics/donald-trump-white-house-staff/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/white-house-staff.html
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/16/trump-foreign-staff-top-aides-join-238446
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/politics/trump-trip-crisis.html
http://www.gq.com/story/white-house-foreign-press-trip-misery-rankings
http://www.gq.com/story/white-house-foreign-press-trip-misery-rankings
http://time.com/4657671/presidents-key-players/
This Politico partially annotated listing of the Inner Trump Staffing Lineup from February 1, 2017 is particularly valuable and instructive. Not least because it is already surprisingly dated, and viewed from the May 23 new reality exhibits a fair number of cross-outs, disappearances, and move-alongs for an Administration only four months in office..Hats off to the Politico laborers in the informational vineyard. We salute you for a public service.
*An homage to the traveling movie classic, “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings”, (1976) starring, among others, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor and Billy Dee Williams about a fictional touring professional baseball team during the 1930’s, shunned by Major League Baseball and the Negro League alike, but stealing their thunder from an entertainment perspective with a lively and irreverent approach to the game and its traditions (Rotten Tomatoes Approval Score: 87%).
Watch the whole movie here on YouTube. They sure didn’t have access to such free visual archives for review in 1976, I can tell you.
If only Trump.45 could merit a magnificent voice like James Earl Jones to dress up his own political carnival shtick, he might have won the popular vote in 2016 in real life, instead of ending up the formal winner, but in a pathetic second place finish for actual votes, and losing to a woman, no less, both of which stubborn facts still drive the Trumpster nuts at night, when he tries to rest.