Holy shit! The powers of the President will not be questioned??? That guy (Stephen Miller), is one of Trump's top advisers. What is going on? Hold up, this reminds me of someone else.
You might be thinking "well the courts just shut down the Muslim ban, so how could he be consolidating power?" That's a fair point. And maybe this is just rhetoric or being bad in front of camera. But maybe there is something more sinister going on.
We all remember the way Trump ran his campaign: like a reality TV show. It was intuitive for everyone, at first, to think that scandal after scandal would bring Trump down, like it has with every politician. This brings us to the main point. Traditional scandals, like Clinton's sex scandal, or Watergate used to start a groundswell. It was an older groundswell, but still a groundswell. Just one scandal (each) led to the (unsuccessful) impeachment of both Clinton and Nixon. No President, or even Presidential candidate used to be safe from this groundswell. So why hasn't grab 'em by the pussy brought Trump down (or take your pick of any of the dozens of scandals he's been a part of in just the last year)?
That old groundswell still exists. We see it in all the protests across the country. But there is also a different, newer kind of groundswell. It is the same groundswell Trump used to ascend to the presidency. Trump was (and obviously still is) in the news ALL THE TIME. He was, and is, all people could talk about. The new groundswell is born from the 24-hour news cycle we live in (a cycle in which the news is constantly updated). Because he was all people could talk about, he grew the largest platform of any candidate, and as a result, reached the most people. He used his constant media presence to get his message across to the people who eventually voted him into office.
The question we should ask now is whether or not Donald Trump (or at least his inner circle) is using one groundswell against the other in a strategic way. Are they incompetent, or do they actually know exactly what they're doing? For example, Trump, in an unprecedented move, appointed Steve Bannon, a personal political adviser, to the National Security Council days after he announced the Muslim ban. Now an ultra-nationalist and deliberate spreader of fake news will have a huge say in our foreign policy and military operations. Another example of an under-covered story is that the administration is trying to roll back Dodd-Frank. Or how about the old CEO of Exxon being appointed as Secretary of State, the job where you represent the U.S. in climate change agreements? Is the Trump administration covering up huge news stories with other ones. Is Trump using a groundswell against himself to benefit himself?
As much of a mouthful as that sentence is, it could be true. In older administrations, the strategy would have been to slowly roll things out in order to avoid push-back or, a groundswell. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has seemingly done everything at once. The media has no idea what to focus on, or how long to focus on it. They're over saturating an already over saturated news cycle. Of course, it's almost impossible to know whether or not this is true. If it is though, it could pave the way for a brand new understanding of how to handle and manipulate a groundswell. Almost everyone is terrified of an angry groundswell at their expense, but could it be that it might be helping this administration achieve its ends? Only time will tell.
