Winning the transition

“He is all we talk about. He is already saving or creating jobs, with what happened with Carrier along with the big but vague announcement with a Japanese billionaire who said he was going to invest $50 billion in the American economy and jobs.”

Two weeks ago president-elect Trump went to the Carrier Corp. plant in Indianapolis to announce that he saved nearly 1,000 jobs; last week he took credit for the $50 billion U.S. investment pledge by Masayoshi Son, the colorful billionaire founder of SoftBank, a Japanese tech conglomerate, a deal Trump says wouldn’t have happened without him.

There really has not been a break since the day he won the election, Sracic said.

And for voters around here — the most concentrated area in the country that went from being Obama supporters to Trump supporters — he is winning the transition from candidate to president.

Trump’s bulldog style has agitated and caused great concern among journalists, scholars and establishment figures who are stunned by his unorthodox tweets announcing job creations, hitting back at a union leader who took a shot at him, or calling out a major manufacturer like Boeing for its cost to build a new-generation Air Force One.

“There is so much happening at the same time, but the overriding thing that we are seeing is that Donald Trump is doing really, really well,” Sracic said.

He describes the way Trump is carrying out his transition as being historic in its pace — and as being viewed very differently by the people who voted for him than by the people who report on him or define him in academic terms.

As a political scientist, Sracic is astounded that “this is such a different political world, we are not used to any of this.”

Trump has no rule of consistency: He breaks political protocol and orthodoxies on a fairly regular basis; he has jumped from campaigning to almost governing and can swiftly change his mind, sometimes going in the complete opposite direction of what he said a day (or even hours) before.

And the tweeting … so much tweeting.

It’s a little scary, because what he is doing is so unfamiliar.

We know how the other way works out, the way we’ve been doing things for years, Sracic said, but we don’t know how this way will work out.

“So, while everyone is sort of attacking him from all sides, it is not affecting him with the voters, just like it didn’t affect him during the election,” Sracic said. “If anything, it’s like he is becoming more popular.”

And that is why most people didn’t pick up on the fact that he was going to win: They could not believe his behavior could equate to a victory.

Sracic warns that the press, the political class, academics, and the establishment still do not understand that his unorthodoxy is popular among voters.

“Honestly, I think that is what people wanted,” he said.

The headline should be that Trump not only won the election, said Sracic, but that he is winning the post-election as well.

So how do reporters and academics chronicle and question this incoming presidency?

Trump is loose with words, rarely placing the same value on them that reporters or traditional politicians do, causing them an abundance of consternation and outrage when he does not account for what he says.

“I think our job is to try to figure out how this might work or not work without bringing closure to the idea that this paradigm cannot work,” Sracic said.

Sracic said you can criticize on an individual basis the Carrier deal; you can’t give tax breaks to every company in the country just to stay here. Yet, rather than just taking a pot shot at Trump or saying that this is just one company and just 1,000 jobs, perhaps we should step back and ask, “Well, can this work?”

If it is not going to work, then we should ask why it won’t.

“Our criticism as academics and journalists can’t be, ‘Well, this isn’t how you do it.’ It forces all of us to step back and say, ‘Well, maybe there is a different way of doing it,’ ” Sracic said.

“Because, if we just dismiss it, then we won’t be listened to at all, because the public is tired of things being done the way they have always been done.”

It may be that Trump is making mistakes; maybe this isn’t the way we should do things — but you need to give a reason for that being the case. We can’t just take things at face value and say you have to do things this way because that is the way we have always done it.

Maybe that’s the lesson — that we have to start thinking more, as simple as that sounds.

Sracic said the problem for reporters is that everyone is crying “Wolf!” too much, especially over the loss of press freedoms: “When you do that, you disarm yourself for a future time when there may be something that we need to scream and yell about.”

“It is a mistake that the press has made for a long time,” he said. “They almost always have a knee-jerk reaction against Republican candidates.

“… So reporters disarm themselves and people don’t believe it when they say Trump is doing something bad, because they already have this perception the press was going to say that anyway because it always says that about Republicans.”

Instead, the press needs to figure out why Trump is so popular and if there is any way this might be able to work. “Certainly they were willing to do that with Obama,” said Sracic.

He said most media are “still reporting this from Washington and New York” perspectives when it should “get down inside America and see it from (another) point of view.”

Trump is so different from past presidents and today’s politicians that we need to forget our traditional paradigms and rethink all of this. That doesn’t mean the press should not scrutinize and question his actions and motives — but it does need to understand that much of the country wanted change, and that’s exactly what it got.

Whether that is a good thing, only time will tell.

Yet, if we continue to chase political windmills in covering Trump, we’ll eventually not be taken seriously by the people.

Salena Zito is a columnist for the Washington Examiner.