President Trump, the great communicator

I’ve been in the D.C. communications business for over 20 years. I’ve worked for and advised some of the highest-profile politicians on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch. I’ve never been so impressed with a politician as I have been with Donald Trump. Since he announced he was running back in June 2015, he has been teaching a master class in how to communicate with the American people in the 21st century. Most importantly, he understands that Democrats and their mainstream media allies wrote the rules on how Republicans are supposed to deal with the media and that the purpose of those rules is to destroy conservative Republicans and elect liberal Democrats. He’s having none of it.

The genius of Donald Trump is that he ignores their rules. He clearly doesn’t do political suicide. He doesn’t assume that the press is even attempting to be fair to him. So he doesn’t validate their credibility by trying to win them over as so many Republican politicians have tried in the past only to fail and wind up on the political carcass heap. Trump seems to understand he has no obligation to kowtow to the D.C. establishment media out of fear they’ll make trouble for his presidency. He knows they don’t accept the results of the election and are going to do everything they can to delegitimize his authority. Thus to CNN, “No, I’m not going to give you a question. You’re fake news.” If the establishment has a temper tantrum, so be it. Trump is the walking embodiment of what we say in the infantry when faced with discomfort: “Suck it up and drive on, soldier.”…

From what I’ve seen so far, my friend and soon to be White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer got the memo and, true to his professionalism, has been boldly going where few press secretaries have dared to go before. He isn’t taking any crap. He isn’t bending the knee in obeisance to the MSM. He is cheerfully, almost gleefully, doing his job with a level of freedom to speak seldom witnessed for a political spokesman. The source of his élan is that he knows he has the full faith and confidence of the President of the United States whose authority under the Constitution derives from the ultimate boss — we the people. That’s liberating. I hope that this attitude infects his Cabinet and congressional Republicans.