Writer Oscar Wilde wrote about the pitfalls of duplicity in 1895. Last Friday the Department of Labor Statistics issued the jobs report numbers for February. The March unemployment percentage fell to 4.7 and 235,000 jobs were reportedly gained in February of 2017. One year earlier, under President Obama, the jobs gained were 242,000 https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/payroll-employment-up-by-242000-in-february-2016.htm and in 2015 the number was 295,000 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_03062015.pdf. President Trump mocked the Obama numbers throughout the primary and presidential campaign, telling his followers not to believe the numbers they were phony numbers. When the recent numbers were released, Press Secretary Sean Spicer spoke to the President prior to his briefing, “I talked to the President prior to this, and he said to quote them very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,” The room burst into laughter http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-monthly-jobs-numbers-sean-spicer-235936.
The laughter punctuated by Sean Spicer’s toothy grin was both disturbing and an indictment on the failure of the working press to somberly call out absurdity for the sake of the public. If you are going to be the Fourth Estate, that comes with an obligation. The founders expected and made the power of the press an unassailable entity, free from government control for a reason, ACCOUNTABILITY. I was embarrassed to see people, I respect, laugh at the most powerful office in the world being reduced to a presidential sideshow. The constant excuse you hear from the Trump spokespeople is, he speaks in a different manner, or he is not like other politicians, “that’s why he was elected.”
Donald Trump is not Yogi Berra keeping the New York Yankee locker room amused with Yogi-isms. This is not a game. Trump-isms are destroying our credibility in the world.
The President’s fast and loose command of the truth has the world wondering if either his predecessor is a felon or he[Trump] is a fool. This parade of pre-written Saturday Night Live skits emanating from the White House is dangerous. When Kim Jong Un’s half-brother brother was recently killed in a Malaysian airport, by having a deadly toxin smeared on his face, the world was aghast https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kim-jong-uns-half-brother-was-killed-by-vx-nerve-agent-a-chemical-weapon-malaysia-police-say/2017/02/23/636c5bda-6e63-4f8e-a5dc-9f8b54f45d0e_story.html?utm_term=.b4275f26bf2d. As horrible an event as this was, the world just kind of shrugged and said, there goes that crazy guy with the bad haircut again. If the press, America’s surrogate, continues to laugh, we will become the country led by a crazy guy with a bad haircut.
Oh sure, I smiled too at first, when Spicer quoted the President, then I thought, what is funny. This was the guy who said, Obama tapped his phones, three million phantoms voted for Hillary Clinton, real unemployment may be as high as 42 percent, he had the largest electoral college win since Reagan, the largest Inaugural crowd ever, lie, lie, lie. I am not laughing. Some of these things are trivial; but how do we separates the trivial from the important? If we cannot trust what the President of the United States says, what happens if the President makes a case for war, how can we trust someone who lies about the small things? Maybe there is a Yogi-ism the President should adopt, “If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.”-Yogi Berra
’18 and Change’