Media Treat Trump’s Team Like Dogs, Biden’s Like Puppies The largely celebratory coverage unwittingly emphasizes the triumph of the press’s own class. By Gerard Baker
When Joe Biden gets to the White House, he will, it seems, be bringing with him a menagerie of domesticated animals, eager to roll over and have their tummies tickled by a solicitous first couple.
There will be Champ and Major, the two German shepherds, one of whom, like his master, is a veteran of the Obama administration. There will be the as-yet-unnamed cat who, we learned last week, will prowl the echoing halls of the executive mansion, no doubt mischievous and imperious by turns, like all felines.
Above all there will be a whole pack of cuddly, playful, yelping puppies, eager for attention and desperate to please, gently nuzzling their master and members of his administration whenever they stoop to stroke them or issue a kind word or a stern command.
These fully house-trained pets will sport White House press passes and carry laptops and microphones. They will project a vulpine self-regard and profess a houndlike commitment to hunting down the truth. But it’s clear already that when brought to heel they will have all the independence of mind of one of those nodding toy dogs that used to adorn the dashboards of motorcars.
The level of critical scrutiny on display so far from the national press corps since Mr. Biden began announcing the members of his administration and its plans makes Toto look like the Hound of the Baskervilles.
There was the giggling excitement from reporters last week when the president-elect announced the latest recruit into his expanding animal kingdom. As I read the coverage from supposedly serious news sources, I tried to imagine for a moment what it would have been like if President Trump had announced at any point in the last year that he was acquiring a cat.
“President Trump to Forcibly Incarcerate Helpless Animal on Federal Property,” The New York Times would doubtless have thundered, in a multiple-byline, six-column front-page blockbuster. CNN would have featured interviews all day with scientists about how cats are Covid superspreaders and how this was the latest act of irresponsibility on the part of a president who had already murdered a quarter-million Americans.
To be fair, we are all suckers for new pets, and excitable reporters, like small children, can be forgiven for falling hopelessly for cute animals. But how does this apply to John Kerry?
The former secretary of state’s anointing as special envoy on climate change has elicited mostly affectionate coverage from most of our media watchdogs. So too the rest of the foreign-policy team. We have been treated to lengthy profiles of Antony Blinken, the designated secretary of state; Jake Sullivan, national security adviser; Avril Haines, director of national intelligence; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ambassador to the United Nations. All highlight their impeccable credentials, their experience in previous Democratic administrations, and the contrast they represent with the dilettantes and extremists of the Trump administration. There’s the occasional dissenting voice but the overall message is carefully consistent with Mr. Biden’s own gloss: “America is back.”
You’d think at minimum that an inquisitive press corps would want to examine all this experience, that the reader might have questions about what these giants of American security strategy contributed to an Obama administration that, as even its friends overseas acknowledge, produced a desultory and confusing foreign policy that did nothing to arrest the decline of American prestige in its eight years.
On economic policy, we are told in awed tones that Janet Yellen’s expertise and experience in what will be the three top domestic roles—at the White House, Federal Reserve and now Treasury—makes her uniquely qualified. But there’s almost no critical assessment of the role she played, especially at the Fed, in the accelerating financialization of the U.S. economy, with all the baleful consequences that has had for most American workers and their living standards.
There’s a larger point here about the rot in America’s institutional leadership that, in part at least, the Trump administration was elected to undo. In its largely celebratory coverage, the press is unwittingly emphasizing what this restoration represents: the triumph of its own class. It is highlighting how completely in lockstep the various elements of the new and old establishments now are: the media and tech platforms, the global corporate bossocracy, the vast, overfed Washington policy crowd, whose different characters pop in and out of government with a change of president without leaving a footprint on the receding sands of American leadership.
Harry Truman famously reminded us that canine friendship is the only enduring loyalty when things go wrong in Washington. Joe Biden and his administration will at least have plenty of other friends to provide comfort as they set out on yet another familiar journey.
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