Media Watcher: Trump’s Gay Presidency
The media give Barack Obama a lot of credit for supporting gay marriage as president, but he mostly swam with the tide, writes Eddie Scarry at the Washington Examiner. His successor, by contrast, deserves far more credit than he gets. After Omar Mateen shot up a gay Orlando nightclub, Scarry points out, Donald Trump called it an attack on the LGBT community. At the GOP convention, PayPal founder Peter Thiel stood on stage and declared he was proud to be gay. Trump even held up a rainbow flag at a campaign rally. And the press ignores it: “Every other Republican is pressed on whether they’d personally bake a cake for a gay wedding. But Trump is almost entirely ignored when he shows support for gays because he unfurled a rainbow flag the wrong way.”
From the Left: Will ‘Pussyhats’ Protests Peter Out?
The Women’s March on Washington was by all accounts a success. But, asks Christine Emba in The Washington Post, what happens now? “Will the pink ‘pussyhats’ just go to the back of the closet?” The fear among liberals is that the anti-Trump protest movement won’t be followed by meaningful political engagement and will peter out, just as did the last one. “A demonstration without follow-up is just . . . Occupy Wall Street,” New Jersey college senior Nancy Xiao told Emba. Indeed, Emba says, the protesters are hoping to take a page from the conservative movement and follow the example of the Tea Party, which “birthed a national movement that reset the Republican agenda and swept a wave of candidates into office in the 2010 midterm elections.”
Historian: 2016’s Big Winners (Other Than Trump)
Donald Trump wasn’t 2016’s only winner. At The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead offers six others. First is Andrew Jackson, because “Old Hickory’s legacy of American populism is one of the most powerful forces in national politics.” Along those same lines is late political theorist Samuel Huntington, who envisioned the political battle between “nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism.” Next is shale — which, Mead writes, is giving US energy production a boost with climbing oil prices. There’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who “has smartly diversified Israel’s foreign policy and sought new relationships wherever he may find them.” The aforementioned Peter Thiel is fifth. Last is, sadly, blood-drenched Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who “continued to brutally reconsolidate his regime’s hold over rebel-held territory, with the prominent help of Russia and Iran.”
Conservative Take: Press Hysteria Over Trump a Mistake
The Trump phenomenon challenges a range of US institutions, writes Ross Douthat in The New York Times. But apparently none more than the press, which is reacting with “a kind of hysterical oppositionalism.” Take, for example, the question of Russia’s attempts to meddle on Trump’s behalf: “This is an incredibly serious business, but it has not produced incredibly serious journalism. Instead there has been a rush to publicize all manner of dubious claims.” The panic peaked with BuzzFeed’s publication of a dubious dossier of unverified rumors. And publications will be rewarded for it: “There is a large and frightened readership looking for confirmation of its darkest fears in every ‘unprecedented’ (but often, not really) move that Trump and his administration make.”
Liberal Editorial Writer: Obama Disses Dems
Barack Obama seemed to signal he’d be a partisan force upon leaving office. But, says Michael McGough at the Los Angeles Times, Obama seems to be sending a different message to Dems. At his last press conference, “he dismissed a reporter’s suggestion that there was a contradiction between his commutation of the sentence of Chelsea Manning . . . and his condemnation of Russia for hacking Democratic e-mail accounts.” Then he was asked about Democrats boycotting Donald Trump’s inauguration. “Obama could have said that he understood the boycotters’ disgust over Trump’s offensive comments or frightening policy proposals,” McGough writes. “Instead he said: ‘With respect to the inauguration, I’m not going to comment on those issues.’”
Compiled by Seth Mandel