Managing the news of the day

It’s tough being a “News Junkie” nowadays. The sheer volume of news since Donald Trump became the 47th President is off the charts. Not surprisingly, a large portion of it is not exactly complimentary. The major media outlets are proclaiming the inevitable doom of the financial markets, yet the Dow Jones average increased nearly 800 points in one day last week. Had it dropped earlier? Yes, and it will drop again. Any realist will tell you, that’s what markets do, they go up, and they go down. In the last few days, the media has also proclaimed that we are now just steps away from a Trump recession. Yet inflation has just gone down for the first time in over four months. Gas is down, eggs are down, mortgage interest rates are down, and illegal immigration is slashed to just about nothing. Tariffs, they say, have turned the trading world upside down, and the media reacts with wailing and gnashing of teeth at what they say is the loss of American leadership in the world. Yet less than a year ago, that same media told us that the world is revulsed at our arrogance, and we should de-ny the concept of “American exceptionalism”. You know, you just can’t please some people! Meanwhile, an attempt to bring about a new culture of efficiency and accountability in gov-ernment, and an effort to take meaningful steps to begin to reduce the 37 trillion-dollar na-tional debt is greeted with derision and ridicule by nearly half of the elected officials in Con-gress. Yep, it’s tough to try to make much sense out of the daily news. It’s sort of like watch-ing a box of fireworks randomly go off in all different directions. Part of the problem is the fact that the current President makes no secret of his love for the camera. Hardly a day goes by when the chief executive does not hold an oval office, no-holds-barred, mudwrestling and roller-derby style press conference. So, when a jamboree of new ideas and radical changes gets going and Trump starts throwing all these new ideas out in an open session, the media cannot control itself. It turns into a daily feeding frenzy, like hummingbirds on co-caine. Remember when the former President typically held 2 or 3 press conferences during the year? President Trump now does that every week. For 4 years, the long-deprived White House press pool operated under “information prohibition” in an effort to hide the emperor who had no clothes. Now, prohibition has been repealed and it’s like an open bar every day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s an out-of-control situation, and when you add to that the deteriorating condition of the Democratic Party, it makes for even more instability in the practice of fair-minded journalism. This country needs the sobering balance of an effective two-party system to function as it should, but following the dismal campaign performance and resulting disarray of the Democrats, that balance simply does not now exist. The Demo-crat party is now in what can only be described as a crisis of confidence and identity that is careening down the world’s slipperiest water slide into a murky, dangerous pool. Peggy Noonan is a five-time bestselling author on the New York Times top selling list, a contributor to NBC and ABC, and a columnist for The Wall Steet Journal. This is what she had to say about the Democrats, the debacle in the 2024 election, and their current predicament, “These guys don’t know what happened, and they are going to lose over and over before they get the message. They aren’t serious people. Their job was to show that they are an alternative to Trump, and instead they are showing why he won. Most importantly, they will continue to lose for a long time.” Such is the state of representative government in our country as the new administration concludes 2 months in office. All things considered, it is certainly fair to say that the new crowd, with all their slips and falls, has a better grip on control, strategy and reality than either the media or the opposing political party. In spite of all the detractors and horrified antagonists, the 47th President continues with the implementation of a plan that relies heavily on unconventional thought, process and application to bring about need-ed changes where the same old devices continue to fail us. The howls and threats from the opposition should not be surprising, but their absolute refusal to consider any and every ef-fort to seek a better path and a better plan to move this nation ahead should disappoint and dishearten us all. Change can be uncomfortable. It can mean readjustment and reordering. But you can either choose to wander along a path that has become unclear and dangerous, or you can plot a new direction. Neither of the two are without risk. The only safe prediction is that the news will continue, and it will not be boring.