PE Trump has talked with the us, the American people, ZERO times since election night. He’s tweeted us, announced a deal with Carrier for 700 jobs, given us a peek into his meeting with the Tech Titans, given reporters off the record sandwiches and chips, given us short blurbs on Boeing and yesterday he gave reporters answers to a few questions on the recent terror attacks. His Thank You Rallies have been private events (yes large events but still private) with invited guests only. Attendees who appear not to fit in have regularly been asked to leave his rallies both before and after the election.
So how is Trump going to talk with the American people? Traditionally, the press has been the conduit that President’s use to talk with us using press conferences, private interviews and short question and answer periods for specific topics. Trump’s chief of staff Reince Preibus has hinted that there will be changes to “traditions” surrounding press access to the president. No details on what that means have been provided.
Why is it a problem that Trump is not talking to us? The President works for us and he needs to tell us where he is taking our Country. So far we’ve been left to read the tea leaves to try and make sense of what the strategy is or even if there is one.
By sifting through Trump’s tweets, vague statements by surrogates and cabinet appointments here are a few of the things may or may not be true about what Trump is thinking:
- The US is going in a very different, aggressive direction with China;
- Trump is willing to antagonize our allies in the Middle East with the new Ambassodor to Israel and the location of our Isreali embassy;
- Trump may or may not trust the CIA (Trump Tweets say no; Kellyanne says yes);
- Trump will not have a formal hierarchy in the White House;
- “Draining the swamp” was just a “cute” campaign slogan;
- Ethics and conflict of interest laws shouldn’t apply to rich people’;
- Every thing done by a Trump administration will be tremendous
It’s like we are stuck in a high stakes game of Marco Polo and the President and his team are yelling so rarely we can’t ever get a read on him.
So here we are, less that 30 days from Trump’s inauguration and we have no clear idea of where Trump is taking us.
What we do know is that Americans don’t trust Trump much. He finally hit a 43% favorability rating, the lowest of any President Elect. His employers, the American people, are worried about what kind of President he will be. About 54% are uncertain, worried and/or pessimistic with 45% optimistic, confident or satisfied. This is dramatically different than Obama(66% optimistic) or George W. Bush(59% optimistic) when they were President Elect.
None of this is surprising. Trump was not elected by a majority of Americans (he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million) and he was never viewed positively by Americans before he was elected. Simply put the majority of Americans don’t want to like PE Trump. Only Trump can fix this and he needs to get started soon by laying out his strategy and letting Americans(or our surrogates in the press) ask questions on the record. In short:
Talk to Us Trump!