Washington Post

When you call the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has primary responsibility for any investigations in Congress related to President Donald Trump, you get voicemail. Here’s what it says: “If you would like to provide information or make an inquiry relating to President Donald Trump, please press 1.” If you press 1, this is the message you receive: “Because of high call volume, we are unable to answer your call at this time.” If you leave your name, number and “any information you would like to provide,” the caller is promised their message will be “reviewed as soon as possible.” The caller is also told they can press 2 for “all other matters” or to speak with the staff of Chair Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). So far, Chaffetz’s committee says it is not planning to probe anything related to Trump as part of its oversight mandate, and despite Democratic pressure. But even if they wanted to, staffers could be overwhelmed by the feedback collected on the committee’s voicemail.

President Trump may have used the power of social media to make his way into the White House, but now social media networks are showing that muscle can work for his opposition, too. The real question, however, is whether this burgeoning new movement can avoid the fate of many so others kick-started by the power of social networks — only to find that it's much harder to make political change than to make a popular hashtag.

The very ability for movements to scale quickly is, in part, why they also can fall apart so quickly compared with traditional grass-roots campaigns. That highlights the crucial difference between old social campaigns and new ones. Scale, even in the form of a huge protest, does not equal success.

President Trump signed an order Jan 30 aimed at cutting regulations on businesses, saying that agencies should eliminate two regulations for each new one. The White House later released the text of the order, which added that the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses. It excluded regulations regarding the military.

The impact of the order was difficult to judge based on the president’s remarks. It could be difficult to implement under current law and would concentrate greater power in the Office of Management and Budget, which already reviews federal regulations. And it would add a new time-consuming requirement for any new congressional legislation on topics as varied as banking, health care, environment, labor conditions and more. President Trump said, “If you have a regulation you want, number one we’re not going to approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms. But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two. But it goes way beyond that.” But experts on government policy said Trump’s formulation made little sense. “There’s no logic to this,” William Gale, a tax and fiscal policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said before seeing the executive order. “The number of regulations is not the key. It’s how onerous regulations are. This seems like a totally nonsensical constraint to me.”

Are some news articles like acai berry fat-loss supplement offers? The answer could help determine whether US elections can shed the weight of false information. In an article published by the New Jersey State Bar Association, MSNBC chief legal correspondent Ari Melber argues that the news is as much a product as a diet pill — and that the fake variety could be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission in the same way as phony claims about the belly-blasting power of a certain botanical.

It's a complicated contention. “Absent the existence of libel, Supreme Court precedents suggest that the First Amendment protects a citizen expressing lies or their version of fake news,” conceded Melber, who has a law degree from Cornell. “Political operatives have strong case law to defend deceptive assertions as protected speech, especially if they show that the lies are part of some wider expression, be it political, satirical or artistic.” However, Melber added, “the court has ruled that some commercial speech, like advertising or communication concerned solely with business, gets less First Amendment protection than political speech.” If the FTC and the court system could agree that fake news isn't really a form of political discourse but is, instead, a kind of commercial offering in which “the political misinformation is the product,” then perhaps the nation's consumer-protection agency could stop some of it, he says.

Although the media are an easy target for President Donald Trump and former-House Speaker Gingrich, it is the public that will suffer from a one-sided war with the press. Democracy thrives on information from government, particularly information about government’s foibles and politicians’ wrongdoings.

“In a democracy, journalists are a built-in check against power. Both Trump and Gingrich in their comments are trying to discredit the one check on their power that they cannot control,” said Kelly McBride, vice president of the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center. “It’s scary because it suggests that they don’t believe in the balance of power that is inherent in democracy. Trump is the most powerful man on the planet right now. And he clearly doesn’t welcome or appreciate anyone who might scrutinize him. Gingrich seems to be in lockstep.” This war also targets federal public affairs staffers. Even in good times, they put the best face on bad situations. But career public information officers know they ultimately serve and owe allegiance to the public and not to any politician. “[G]overnment communicators, at all levels of the administration, must be allowed to practice their profession, to serve the public interest by being the timely, credible and trusted source of factual information about government,” said the National Association of Government Communicators. “The new administration needs to understand that good government requires good communication. Good communication is guided by ethics, like not knowingly or intentionally withholding information that is publicly releasable, taking swift and effective action to prevent the public release of false or misleading information, and above all else never lying to the media because in government communication, the truth is sacred.”

Filmmakers often tout the accolades their new movies have received from critics in the media via creatively excerpted blurbs. The new president is doing the same thing.

A page on the White House website, called “Praise for President Trump's Bold Action,” looks a bit like an ad for the latest blockbuster. A four-star review seems to be the only thing missing. Trump's team did, of course, pick the most flattering excerpts from these articles. The Chicago Tribune editorial board applauded the president's early focus on jobs but also wrote that “Trump's prickly temperament — his thin skin, especially — has already been a distraction.” So the “praise” for Trump's first week has come with a lot of qualifiers. But there is a clear strategy here: Trump wants to promote the idea that the negative media is coming around, admitting — perhaps reluctantly — that he is doing a good job.

In a floor speech, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), praised the physical and mental powers of President Donald Trump and encouraged people to get “unvarnished” news directly from the president, not from the news media.

“Just think what the media would be saying about President Trump if he were a Democrat,” Rep Smith said during the evening time reserved for one-minute speeches. “He has tremendous energy. He campaigned for 18 months, puts in 15-hour days, and has the stamina of a bull elephant, like Teddy Roosevelt. He is courageous and fearless. Given the amount of hate directed his way, no doubt he constantly receives death threats, but that doesn’t curtail his public appearances or seem to worry him in the least.” “The national liberal media won’t print that, or air it, or post it,” Rep Smith said. “Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” Rep Smith is also a member of the House Freedom of the Press caucus.

Chris Lehane no longer plants political attacks in the news media the way he did in the Clinton White House or for Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Instead, he opts for TV spots that feature happy middle-class families promoting Airbnb, the home-sharing company where he is head of policy.

Lehane is at the forefront of a war to fight fundamental threats to the company — scores of local laws that prohibit individuals from turning private homes into hotels, and the perception that Airbnb drives up housing prices by taking units off the market. He is trying to turn a cutting-edge $30 billion company into an organized political movement — one that is about helping a battered middle class earn extra money by renting out their homes.

White House Spokesman Sean Spicer should have listened to Ari Fleischer. After Spicer's flagrant misstatement of Inauguration Day crowd figures over the weekend, Fleischer — a former White House press secretary trying to help the current one — offered some free advice. “As soon as a press secretary gets into statistics and facts, the press is going to fact-check the press secretary,” Fleischer said. “So don't use a fact, don't use a stat, unless you're 100 percent certain you've got it nailed down.” But, Spicer stood before reporters on Jan 24 and delivered this whopper, in defense of President Trump's bogus claim that massive voter fraud cost him the popular vote in November: “I think there's been studies. There was one that came out of Pew [in] 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted were not citizens.”

It is hard to overstate what a brazen lie this was. I say “lie” — a loaded word that suggests Spicer knew he was telling a falsehood — because it is inconceivable that he believed it to be true. Trump has mischaracterized Pew's research on more than one occasion, and fact-checkers have crushed him for it. There is no way that Spicer, whose job requires him to obsess over media coverage, did not know that this absurd claim has been debunked.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department, cleared a key Senate panel with bipartisan support, signaling an easy path to confirmation. The Senate Commerce Committee approved Ross's nomination in a voice vote with no opposition.

Ross amassed his fortune by investing in distressed industries that have been hard hit by the forces of globalization, including steel, coal and textiles. He was one of Trump’s key advisers on trade policy on the campaign trail and is slated to take a leading role in carrying out the White House’s promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. During his confirmation hearing, Ross advocated the need for bilateral trade deals rather than sweeping agreements such as the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.