OPINION:
President-elect Donald Trump’s critics keep auditioning things to worry about. The latest is the Trump transition, panned as chaotic, dysfunctional and late. Every time the elevator stops at ground floor at Trump Tower, the gaggle of impatient reporters duly note who steps off and who steps on.
The President-elect — any president-elect, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative — must focus on and recruit the people who will help him run the government, and he has to push away the horde of job-seekers, all of whom are trying to reassure the incoming president that they were for him all along.
Anyone who has been in Washington long enough to watch two or more transitions recognizes that, as the late, great Yogi Berra would put it, watching the Trump transition is like deja vu all over again. In fact, the Donald is moving more quickly than many of his predecessors.
But for the early appointment of Timothy Geithner as secretary of the Treasury, Barack Obama did not name Hillary Clinton as secretary of State and Eric Holder as attorney general until Dec. 1, 2008. Mr. Geithner was named on Nov. 24, when the nation was perceived to be in a financial crisis, and the new president-elect wanted to reassure the financial markets that he was on the case. He didn’t make his last two Cabinet appointments, for secretaries of Health and Human Services and Commerce, until the last week in February, a month, give or take, after the inauguration.
The media-manufactured fretting irritates one of Barack Obama’s top aides, David Axelrod, who says there may be several reasons why he isn’t happy with the Trump transition but “the pace of announcements isn’t one of them. That’s not a fair shot.”
Speculation about who will get what is, of course, part of the fun in Washington. It’s even more fun when you understand how the game is played. The incoming president or someone on his transition team sometimes “mentions” someone as a prospect for the Cabinet merely to boost his ego, knowing the job will go to someone else. Only in Washington does getting a fake nod from “the Great Mentioner” enhance a loser’s marketability.
These losers are much like the baseball teams that make the playoffs but never get to the World Series. They can boast of their being mentioned, just not too much, lest they risk being called out on strikes.
Other losers, afraid the Great Mentioner will forget them, resort to mentioning themselves, suggesting the president offered them jobs but they declined. This is rarely appreciated by the president, because it will be taken by hungry reporters eager for a crumb to mean that the new president is struggling to fill out his administration.
This dancing around a slow news season — it was a cliche of vaudeville that the three dullest weeks of the year were Easter week, Christmas week, and a week in Philadelphia — is particularly frustrating for the newspaper editors and television broadcasters who have pages and hours to fill with little to fill them with.
The best prescription for news junkies is to “chill,” enjoy the final week of college football, take another plate of turkey and sweet potatoes (with marshmallow topping for the lucky) and hang on. The new president will finally fill his dance card. He always has.
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