Listen Up! Pit Bulls and Politics – Opinion

Hugh Mackenzie
Huntsville Doppler

Who really gives a damn about whether or not the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday was bigger than Barack Obama’s in 2009? Certainly, I don’t. If POTUS wants to boast that his was the biggest, so what? That’s Donald Trump. Everything is bigger and better when it comes to him, right down to his manhood (if you remember the election campaign). There is no surprise here.

While I believe the media made too much of the “crowd” issue, what really astounds me is the response from the White House. Poor old Sean Spicer, the new Press Secretary, his first White House briefing and he was sent out there to read a statement, not speak off the cuff as Press Secretaries do, on an issue so small that under other circumstances it would not even be a footnote in history. But it is now, because the statement was nothing more than a McCarthy-style attempt to misrepresent the facts on a matter of no importance. It sent a clear message that propaganda is the new White House order and it ruined, right off the bat, the credibility of Sean Spicer with the mainstream media.

My bet is that Spicer was just the mouthpiece and did not even write the statement he read. It would not surprise me if it was actually written by Kellyanne Conway, perhaps not yet a household name. Her official title is Counsellor to the President but, in reality, she is Pit Bull-in-Chief. Indeed, when questioned about the Spicer Statement, Conway invented a new word for lying, which I suspect will go viral. She said that the Press Secretary was not lying, but simply presenting “alternative facts”. Umm?? Conway also took after a commentator who was pushing her on this issue, suggesting that the Trump Administration may have to rethink their relationship with the press. McCarthyism indeed.

Two quotes on the internet caught my attention today. One was from former Liberal leader Bob Rae. “We are now living in an environment where telling the truth will take exceptional courage.”

The other was from CBC’s Peter Mansbridge. “When POTUS or his people flat-out lie, a fundamental pillar of democracy is threatened.”

By now, anyone with an ounce of objectivity knows that Donald Trump is prone to exaggeration and misstatements. It is his style. He often appears to be less concerned about the truth or accuracy than he is about the message. It has worked for him and he is not likely to change it. That’s who he is and that is how he will be as President. So the real question is, how is this going to be managed? It certainly won’t be the Pit Bull-in-Chief. She will be the one to stir it up.

Every leadership transition has internal strife. There are those that genuinely want to put together a team that will make the leader successful and who will therefore have the courage to stand up and tell him or her what they need to hear and not just what they want to hear. And then there are those who care less about that than they do about cold revenge against their own people who did not support them in the primaries or leadership race, as well as those on the other side of the aisle. They have absolutely no interest in unity. Their only interest is control and power. In a small way, I have been there and I have seen that.

And so, there will be two factions in the Trump White House; hopefully people like Reince Priebus, his Chief of Staff, and some of his Cabinet members who will tell it like it is and mute his propensity to fly off the handle and damn the consequences. And then there will be those like Kellyanne Conway and former Breitbart Pooh-Bah, Steve Brannon, who will promote it, feed his ego and dine out on his thin skin. To me, achieving their narrow partisan objectives and consolidating their power appears to be far more important than national unity, integrity, the truth or even good government.

The cynic in me says that the Pit Bull-in-Chief and her team will rule the day in the Trump White House. Intimidation, threatening, bullying and “alternative facts” will be useful tools and confrontation will be the order of the day. That will not help Donald Trump to be a good President and it will do little to leave him with a positive legacy. It is not the type of help he needs around him.

To me, the most significant and concerning moment in the brief time Donald Trump has been President was not his inauguration speech. He was speaking to his core. I get that. But the messages that were sent on Saturday and Sunday, on the back of a totally insignificant issue, on what we can expect from the White House in the coming years were disturbing and somewhat frightening. To me, that was a sad beginning to Trump’s Presidency.

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