Dammit, people! I didn’t like Trump, the candidate—I didn’t vote for him. I’ve been reasonably pleased with his cabinet nominations—oh, I’d rather see John Bolton as secretary of State, and his repeated humiliation of Mitt Romney was petty and childish, but on the whole I’ve been pleased. But he still strikes me as a buffoon who every day is in danger of stepping on his own small … gains in popularity with some boneheaded tweet. Someone whose recent program proposals—a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, paid maternal leave, “fair” trade, massive tariffs, and Trump, the Man on the White Horse, coming in to meddle individually—have been proposed and used by Democrats going back at least as far as FDR. Someone actual conservatives and libertarians are going to have to keep a careful eye on, because he really does seem to share with Obama the Progressive conviction that the Great Man is above normal bounds on behavior.
But seriously people, the degree of utter nincompoopery in the last days has just gotten completely out of control. It was bad enough with the moron who thought it was a good idea to harass Ivanka Trump, her three kids, and her husband on an airplane, and the nincompoops who defended the moron; then we got Kevin Williamson, who rightly suggested this was unmannerly—but really spoiled the effect by adding “Uday and Qusay” to the Trump family. (Pro tip, Kev—adding two psychopathic mass-murdering rapists to the Trump family really plays hell with your paean to manners.)
Then there’s Jennifer Rubin’s attempt to set a Guinness Book world record for the number of times you can demonstrate Godwin’s Law in a professional press context. She also jumped in on the second-stupidest complaint of the day today, that Trump was using the White House web site to advertise Melania’s jewelry line.
Why is this stupid? Because the sole mention I can find—which is, in fact, the one causing panty-wadding at Raw Story, the Chicago Tribune, and Mediaite, among others—is one line in her official biography, reading:
Melania is also a successful entrepreneur. In April 2010, Melania Trump launched her own jewelry collection, “Melania™ Timepieces & Jewelry” on QVC.
That’s some advertising there, folks.
But that’s still only the second-stupidest conniption, hard as that is to imagine. It was neatly overtaken by a story that both the Daily Beast and Daily Caller (sadly) fell for.
It was on the Daily Beast.
It was on the Daily Caller.
Climate Depot picked it up.
Even Ed Driscoll picked it up on Instapundit.
The story? That Trump’s WhiteHouse.gov “disappeared” civil rights, climate change, and LGBT rights. The proof? Why, the URLs for /the-record/health-care and /issues/civil-rights and /lgbt were returning “page not found.”
Congratulation, everyone: you’ve discovered that the Trump staff put up their own version of the WhiteHouse.gov website. No, the previous pages were not “disappeared”—if you want to see them, you can find them by looking at ObamaWhiteHouse.gov, as was announced some days before the inauguration. But the Trump website now has Trump’s core issues under the Issues heading.
Surprise? Come on. You know what? After eight whole years, the Obama White House site didn’t include a single entry for an “America First Energy Plan.”
People, seriously, right after the election I was posting a suggestion that people (1) calm the hell down, and (2) grow the hell up. (Okay, I used a different expletive but I’m being nice now.) It’s still good advice. Trump has been president, as I write this, for eight hours, twelve minutes, and about 50 seconds. Changing the website contents to suit his issues is just a normal day-to-day thing. So is mentioning Melania’s jewelry in her official bio. (Go look at Michelle’s bio if you think she was above plugging her stuff.) And it’s pretty unlikely Trump—Jared Kushner’s father-in-law—using the phrase “America First!” was a callback to Charles Lindbergh’s short-lived isolationist movement 80-odd years ago. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Bill Kristol.)
If people are going to get this excited about one-line mentions in a bio, and ordinary housekeeping on a website, what are you going to do when Trump actually does something you don’t like?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member