Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
President in name only: Trump’s strings being pulled by Fox News
When President Donald Trump nominated Rex Tillerson for secretary of state in January 2017, he boasted about having “one of the great Cabinets ever put together” and about bringing “the greatest people into government.”
That was howlingly untrue, as many of Trump’s Cabinet picks were unqualified and in several cases were hell-bent on dismantling the very agencies they had been chosen to lead.
But now, events have taken an even worse turn. After 14 months of sending those “greatest people” running for the exits by being the quintessentially terrible boss — narcissistic, erratic, uninformed and always ready to undercut — Trump apparently is being forced to turn to people who play experts on TV to fill jobs in his administration.
CNBC analyst and former host Larry Kudlow and frequent Fox News contributor John Bolton have come aboard the Trump team in the president’s latest staffing shakeup, and there are rumors that other TV talk show personalities may follow. They include “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth as a replacement for Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin.
For Trump to turn to conservative TV for job candidates is hardly surprising, given that he apparently is far more interested in getting his information from those sources than from the many supremely qualified people who serve in the U.S. government.
But while late-night TV hosts have had a ball with the situation, it’s disconcerting.
Bolton, chosen to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster, is hawkish to an extreme. That was evidenced perhaps most alarmingly during the early 2000s when, as a member of the Bush administration, he forcefully argued that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He’s also said the U.S. should declare war on Iraq and North Korea.
Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, didn’t major in economics in college, does not have a Ph.D. in the field and hasn’t done on-the-ground work in the field since the mid-1990s, when his career went sideways amid a serious drug and alcohol problem.
And while all economic “experts” get a lot wrong, Kudlow has been spectacularly wrong in his commentary. The most notable came in December 2007, when Kudlow said: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). Goldilocks is alive and well. The Bush boom is alive and well.”
Anybody in Las Vegas remember what happened next?
Granted, Kudlow plays well on TV and may help Trump sell his economic policies to viewers — at least the Fox News types.
But as far as providing in-depth, expert and independent advice to a president who desperately needs it? Forget it. Kudlow has already caved in to Trump on his steel and aluminum tariffs, initially criticizing them — which they deserved — but then saying he’d come around to Trump’s way of thinking.
Wow, that was fast.
Hegseth also poses concerns as a potential administration member, as some veterans have raised concerns that he’ll push toward privatizing services.
Of course, Trump isn’t the first president to bring members of the media onto his team, occasionally even in high-level roles. But this feels different. It’s already been well-documented that Trump parrots what he hears on Fox News and other TV shows, suggesting at best that he’s highly suggestible to their messaging and at worst that he’s being manipulated by them.
It all raises a question: Is Fox News really the president of the United States?