Turmoil or original way to run the ship of state? Nominees are sometimes not saying what Trump says.

Pundits have used these differences to portray a new administration born in disarray. Yet perhaps we are witnessing something else.

Such frankness from cabinet nominees is a refreshing departure from the customary spectacle of officials robotically repeating their talking points. President Trump has not only picked extraordinarily capable men and women, he has self-assuredly encouraged them to speak their minds.

“I want them to be themselves,” he tweeted, “and express their own thoughts, not mine!”

Point is, he’s something new on the scene, if you haven’t noticed, has been from the start.The writer goes on to discuss other presidents’ leadership strategies, including George Washington, who listened to all sides of an issue from his top-drawer coterie, in a meeting, questioning each along the way, and then put a plan together.

via The Method in Trump’s Tumult – WSJ

Onlookers get a kick out of it. Cane-wielder is a showman.

Among top questions to be put to new immigrants, refugees, etc.: What’s your position on Islamic law? should rank at top of list.

The downside of immigration.

. . . who strikes out more than other players, at least early in the season. But was top-drawer campaigner, winning it all.

He’s the star, most valuable player, team captain. Where would the team be without him? In last place, that’s where.

It took a slugger to fire up the slumbering fans vs. the stumbling standard-bearer for the abominable other side. (What were they thinking?)

Did it with home runs at home and away, sweeping series after series in previously unconquerable Pa., Wisc., Mich., etc.

Next strikeout, remember that. Go team go.

Said he would give the critic a new nose, etc.

Verrrrry unpresidential, right?

They caved to protestors and dropped Ivanka’s line. He objected.

Yikes, another Harry Truman.  (Link astutely supplied by commenter M Scott Eiland)

Part of a longer piece by onetime Sun-Times owner held in low esteem by many former Sun-Times news people, Conrad Black:

[Trump’s] losses of temper and lapses of civility are sometimes signs of his large ego, sometimes of business method exercised for the first time from the presidency, but they are also sometimes cunning tactics to exploit the weakness and stupidity of the Democratic leadership and their brain-dead claque in Hollywood and most of the press. [boldface added]

Black has checkered history, to say the least, and the broken clock is right twice a day — he did his time , by the way — and has The Donald and our overall situation nicely in this .

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Later: Whoa! Forget the smarmy broken-clock-twice-a-day business. On careful reading, I think the whole column is brilliant. Glad to see the author back in the newspaper business.

Someone named Katie Tur is afraid Trump might have her killed.

Well, he wants to get along with Putin, doesn’t he?

The two Fox giants sparred in a postmortem about Trump’s finessing of O’Reilly’s reminding him of Putin’s killer history. 

“Not that it was a moral equivalence between the United States and Russia about actions, but that we don’t have a right to form a judgment,” O’Reilly said. “It’s the same philosophy that Franklin Roosevelt used when he dealt with Stalin. What Trump wants to do is enlist Putin’s help to defeat ISIS and to get away from Iran, to weaken Iran.”

Krauthammer then jumped on O’Reilly, arguing he provided two different answers.

“One was a moral answer, we don’t have the right, presumably because of our own sins, to criticize him,” Krauthammer said. “The other answer was a pragmatic one.”

“But that’s his motivation,” O’Reilly countered. “That’s why he doesn’t say what I just said, that Putin’s a killer, because he wants Putin’s help to beat ISIS and Iran.”

Well. Trump’s was a too candid deal-maker’s response to the professionally impertinent O’Reilly, a con man in his own right whose smile is worth a thousand winks.

The deal-maker intends to deal with Putin in his role as leader of a world power, with heavy stakes having to do with national security.

The interrogator, on the other hand, is a carny, going for headline and clicks, knowing his man would neither concede nor call him on his impertinence.

“You’re kidding,” he would not say, declining to haggle with the showman, even if he’s a showman himself — with a twist. He’s also chosen leader of a great nation, preparing to deal with a lesser, but otherwise objectionable, national leader in a fight with Islamic fascism.

Another FDR come to judgment? Dealing not with the world champion mass-murderer Stalin but with his latest successor. “Uncle Joe,” FDR called him. We are at war again, and the enemy of our enemy is provisionally our friend. That or another enemy.

The age-old age of the deal is upon us again.

When Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” engaging in a verbal fistfight with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” the hysterics in the media saw the sky falling. (Chicken Little lives.). . .

That’s not all. How foolish of F. Chuck Todd, as Rush Limbaugh refers to him, to call alternative facts a lie. Doing so, he consigns “On the other hand . . . ” to the trash-bin of discontinued phrases.

Fact is (sorry), it’s a term of argument. You concede a point but raise another in at least partial rebuttal: “Consider this, if you will [or dare].”

Chuck, on the other hand, is deaf to the tones of debate. But prosecutors always are, and he engages in prosecutory journalism, as do many of his colleagues in the dismal profession.

For more of the linked analysis/opinion piece quoted above by Suzanne Fields, read the rest of: Telling the post-truth with alternative facts

For more of this unlinked analysis by Jim Bowman, stick with Blithe Spirit. And thank you for that.