When a cartoonish caricature of an evil tycoon eliminates the communications department at one of his businesses, and responds to all press inquiries with a poop emoji, you might be excused for thinking, “What do you expect from Simon Legree?”
But when a series of advisers close to a man who wants to be president develops a Presidential Transition Project that would radically reduce press access to the White House, you won’t be excused for thinking, “Oh, he’s just doing that to make America great again.”
Because the proper thing to think is quite clear: He’s got something, perhaps lots of things, to hide.
The concept is the brainchild of the increasingly loony Heritage Foundation, which used to be the sober redoubt of a bunch of Reaganauts and now has fully, exclusively come aboard the Trump Train.
Its Project 2025, a working paper — actually, more of a coffee-table book, apparently — designed to create a template for a new authoritarian second administration for Donald Trump, with a motto along the lines of, “This time, we really mean it, man!,” Heritage and some allies suggest the new administration should “reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press corps at the White House.
Because of what? Again, apparently because the scribes and their broadcast brethren are ipso facto not loyal enough to the Florida man who wants revenge for his 2020 election loss.
But the press hasn’t been loyal, at all, to any president with the exception perhaps of John Kennedy, who was just so good-looking that the whole nation was in his thrall.
Does Project 2025 think newspapers, magazines, TV and radio reporters will get more loyal if they get kicked out of their tiny cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue and are forced to pound away on their laptops at the Starbucks down the street? Or sitting under a tree in the park in Lafayette Circle? What’s the petty point?
Most administrations try to cultivate the press, members of which are actually surprisingly amenable to cultivation, especially if a free beer and a burger are involved. They know how to use the ink-stained wretches by promising access, and by serving as Machiavellian anonymous sources for stories aimed at undercutting bureaucratic rivals.
You can’t let a hundred flowers bloom if you take away the little, nourishing compost heap near the Rose Garden.
The “reexamine” of a place for the press at the heart of the executive branch is but a tiny footnote in the grand scheme that is Project 2025,
“With a nearly 1,000-page Project 2025 handbook and an ‘army’ of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the ‘deep state’ bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers,” the Associated Press reports.
Now, personally, the idea of losing that number, or a much higher number, of hidebound Washington bureaucrats does not exactly make tears well up in me. It’s not a bad idea, in principle.
But Heritage’s idea of who to replace them with — and replaced they would be — is the kind of stuff that would make you long for some boring deep-stater with a cushy do-nothing job.
Their notion after the ousting is to replace them with Trump backers more than happy to simply implement the autocrat’s wishes.
Give me despotism by boring gray men any day than despotism by lackeys of the taller, fatter Napoleon.
And give me a tiny desk when I get transferred to the D.C. bureau. Bring me a burger, and a beer, and we’ll talk.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
