March 2017

[Commentary] President Barack Obama more than any other president sought to apply Silicon Valley’s disruptive methods to government in an effort to make it work better for the people it’s supposed to serve. The White House has tapped President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to lead the newly christened White House Office of American Innovation, which will reportedly operate like an in-house management consultancy, bringing fresh business ideas to government. Destructive innovation can work well for a company like, say, Uber, which is accountable only to its customers. But government doesn’t have customers. It has citizens for whom the government theoretically works. In practice that means policymakers can’t cavalierly destroy something to build it anew. A functional democracy doesn’t pick winners and losers. It exists to serve everyone. Instead of winner-take-all disruption, Kushner and his team of tech A-listers should tackle broader issues of efficiency and collaboration, which can be solved with better technology or processes—things that add value without taking any away from somewhere else.

[Commentary] As if powered by a celestial mainspring, the press publishes the same three basic stories about every new presidential administration. Usually up first in their rotation is a breathless beat-sweetener about the incoming vice president. The second inevitable wave of stories claims that the administration is “rebooting.” March 27’s Washington Post brings us, on Page 1 above the fold, the third classic of the first 100 days of reporting: A story about the coming “reorganization“ of government—this time by Prince Jared, the president’s son-in-law.

[Commentary] The 2016 election was unimaginable, and the particulars of Russian meddling deserve further scrutiny. But we seem to have fallen into a trap: The unimaginable, happening out in the open day after day, not only continues to dull our defenses but also creates a need to see a conspiracy big enough, a secret terrible enough to explain how this can be happening to our country. Fraudulent news stories, which used to be largely a right-wing phenomenon, are becoming increasingly popular among those who oppose the president. Each story dangles the promise of a secret that can explain the unimaginable. Each story comes with the ready justification that desperate times call for outrageous claims. But each story deals yet another blow to our fact-based reality, destroying the very fabric of politics that President Donald Trump so clearly disdains.

[Masha Gessen is the author of "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin"]

[Commentary] So when President Donald Trump raised the white flag on Obamacare March 24, did he pick up the phone and gave the exclusive to Breitbart, The Daily Caller or LifeZette? Nope. He called reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times. But you'd have thought that reaching out to ideological sympathizers was inevitable, given the journalistic sturm und drang about the incursions of right-leaning media in these early days of a new Washington era. Well, any chronicle of access will need to include the capital's longtime home teams, with March 24's carefully served bulletins from the Trump News Service suggesting how a mix of old media clout, old-fashioned journalistic quality and Trump's own Queens-bred craving to be accepted by various establishments may be more enduring than many assume. As Bill Kristol, founder of The Weekly Standard, put it about Trump: "He's always understood the power of and craved acceptance by the mainstream media." Adds Rich Lowry, editor of National Review: "He hates the mainstream media — and loves the mainstream media. No president has ever followed his news coverage so closely or cared about it so much."