Inaugural Address

[Benton]

(01-23-2017, 10:50 AM)xxlt Wrote: I wasn't to surprised when the NY Times and George Will panned the Trump inaugural address. Politics makes strange bed fellows.

 

I was reading my local paper — which is ultra-conservative — on Sunday and started laughing about halfway through. There were four articles on Trump, and in three of them the writer gave Trump or his people room to talk, and then pointed out the error of what they said. Normally, to keep the story from wandering, reporters will only contradict the info if it's pertinent to the story (for example if a story about healthcare providers has a source providing anecdotal and incorrect info on heart disease rates, the reporter usually won't  waste inches to contradict the source since it's not directly related to the story).

Thanks to the POTUS's petulance with the media, that's what we've got to look forward to. Four years of his every word dissected not because it pertains to how it effects the people, but because he's dishonest and unwilling to work with the public.

A retiring lawmaker years ago said one of the most important skills (and one disappearing) for a lawmaker is explaining legislation to constituents. That's a big part of the president's job. Trump can't do that effectively if he's trying to speaking to people about healthcare or energy or tort reform, and goes off on tangents about "fake news" or how big his inauguration was.

(01-23-2017, 11:17 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I think that after a tumultuous election cycle and with him losing the popular vote, he should have come out there with a unifying speech. But that is not what it was. This was a continuation of campaign speeches that we saw, and it had Bannon's fingerprints all over it. It was darker than past inaugural addresses, and it insulted all of the elected officials on the platform with him by blaming them for the darkness.

I don't think he has potential to govern effectively because I don't think he knows how to govern. He is still in campaign mode, and this is because he doesn't have the public service experience to know that once the election is over there is a switch that has to be flipped. He hasn't done that, and he's listening to people that either don't know that themselves or haven't been able to convince him.

Agreed.