Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg. Screen cap from CNN.
Chaos v. Parkland
by Tom Sullivan
Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg. Screen cap from CNN.
For conspiracy theorists who see George Soros behind every headline, perhaps he was behind Donald Trump's surprise presidential win. Why not?
Damon Linker writes at The Week:
If you were an all-powerful Democratic strategist out to subvert the Republican Party from the inside, you would be hard pressed to devise a more effective plan than the remarkable scene that unfolded on Wednesday afternoon in a televised meeting at the White House between the president and congressional leaders.The champion of conservatives who for years warned that Obama's jack-booted thugs would kick in gun-owners' doors and confiscate their weapons advocated something eerily similar, at least for "crazy" people. “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump told the stunned room.
On Wednesday evening, the president became "unglued," in the words of one official familiar with the president's state of mind.There was no vetting of industry officials invited to the White House to discuss trade. White House chief of staff John Kelly did not know their names.
A trifecta of events had set him off in a way that two officials said they had not seen before: Hope Hicks' testimony to lawmakers investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election, conduct by his embattled attorney general and the treatment of his son-in-law by his chief of staff.
Trump, the two officials said, was angry and gunning for a fight, and he chose a trade war, spurred on by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the White House director for trade — and against longstanding advice from his economic chair Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
There were no prepared, approved remarks for the president to give at the planned meeting, there was no diplomatic strategy for how to alert foreign trade partners, there was no legislative strategy in place for informing Congress and no agreed upon communications plan beyond an email cobbled together by Ross's team at the Commerce Department late Wednesday that had not been approved by the White House.Chaos.
No one at the State Department, the Treasury Department or the Defense Department had been told that a new policy was about to be announced or given an opportunity to weigh in in advance.
The kids agreed that if they were going to launch a media assault, they needed to present a unified front. They couldn’t seem to be contradicting each other or going off in different directions at once. So they set about establishing “what we needed to say, the things we shouldn’t be saying,” says Delaney. David says he drew criticism — even from his friends — for that first interview on Fox, in which he failed to acknowledge the enormity of the loss for so many of his neighbors. “I still do feel like kind of an asshole for going on there and not being sensitive about the situation and the grieving families, but I knew that I had to because the news cycle moves so fast that if I didn’t get out there, this would be just another mass shooting,” he says.The group worked on words to use and those to avoid. They gamed out responses to critics. They missed meals and lost sleep. They planned a national rally in D.C. for March 24 — soon enough "to keep the media on the hook." They enlisted help from a mother with a PR background, and Deena Katz, an organizer of the Women’s March, helped in obtaining permits for March for Our Lives. The Michael Bloomberg-sponsored Everytown for Gun Safety will fund marches in other cities.
The most important thing, the group agreed, was to sidestep partisanship, “to avoid straight-out blaming the GOP,” Delaney says, “because this is an issue, a nonpartisan issue, an issue of the NRA and not of ‘Republican.’ We were trying to work that out so that we wouldn’t isolate this entire group of people.”
The kids also understood that the media would soon tire of the same three or four faces and that they had to have a deep enough bench to offer up “a couple handfuls” of students who were good on-camera, says Jaclyn. That night, “we established splitting up the media. It was very organic. We knew our places.” They agreed to limit their group to about 20 — large enough to appear on many different media outlets at once. Within the group, each person has taken on a particular role. “David focuses on the hard facts. Cameron is sarcastic and witty. Emma’s strong. I’m more of an organizer,” Jaclyn says. “Alex is the emotional remembrance of it all. Alfonso”— Calderon, comparatively conservative — “does all the Spanish interviews.”