President Trump speaks during the swearing-in ceremony of Judge Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Court associate justice in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington on Monday. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/Bloomberg News)
For an administration that supposedly hates the press so much, the people in it sure do like to blab a lot. All administrations leak and are beset by process stories, but this one threatens to consume itself before it turns 100 days old. Just this week, we have been treated to endless “insider” anonymous quotes detailing internecine White House warfare. We’ve even had anonymous sources contradicting other anonymous sources on this same story: One set of blind quotes says the White House fight between Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner is about nationalism vs. internationalism, but the other says it’s really about the approach of blowing things up vs. being more accommodating.
One can argue that the stories don’t matter to anyone except the White House press corps and a few hundred thousand people who watch cable news all day. But the freedom that White House staffers apparently feel to spill their dysfunction reveals a disorganized, rudderless presidency. It implies an organization that won’t be able to get its act together when the stakes do matter. It isn’t the substance of the leaks as much as the fact that no one can seem to stop them. As yet another anonymous White House leaker put it to a Politico reporter: “One hundred days is the marker, and we’ve got essentially 2 1/2 weeks to turn everything around. This is going to be a monumental task.”