The Resignation of National Security Advisor Flynn: Thuds and Screams from the Topkapi Palace Department

A Beat Sweetener for Gary Cohn!: Thuds and Screams from the Topkapi Palace

Topkapi Palace

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Moral fault attaches to anybody who pays money to the New York Times for any purpose as long as it publishes things like this:

Kate Kelly: Trump’s Economic Cabinet Is Mostly Bare. This Man Fills the Void: "Gary Cohn... briefed Mr. Trump... argued that the bold infrastructure projects that Mr. Trump envisioned...

...would need private-industry partners, those people said, in order to avoid weighing down the government with costs. That got Mr. Trump’s attention. The president-elect turned to the other people in the room—his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon; his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and Steven T. Mnuchin, his campaign’s chief fund-raiser and Mr. Trump’s nominee to be Treasury secretary—surprised that his infrastructure ideas had such a potential downside. “Is this true?” Mr. Trump asked the group, according to those people. Heads nodded. “Why did I have to wait to have this guy tell me?” he demanded.

This is what my late coauthor Susan Rasky called a "beat sweetener".

In one paragraph, Kate Kelly has claimed that:

  1. Gary Cohn is brave.
  2. Gary Cohn is willing to tell the president important truths that nobody else--not even his son-in-law and the future Treasury Secretary--will tell him.
  3. President Trump trusts Gary Cohn.
  4. President Trump believes Gary Cohn.

Such beat sweeteners appear when their subject inside the White House:

  1. wants to demonstrate that he was won the struggle for the President's ear and trust that is at the heart of power within the imperial court's inner circle.
  2. wants to claim that he has won the the struggle as a move in the struggle for influence and authority with those outside the imperial court's inner circle--and to aid him in his struggle.
  3. wants to have journalists claim that he was a powerful member of his inner circle to aid his post-administration career.
  4. (more rarely) a journalist thinks the courtier will be pleased by this message getting out.

This requires a complaisant journalist (or a journalist who thinks they are being complaisant by getting this message out).

But is any of it true?

Put it this way: I have never had anybody else who was present at a meeting portrayed this way in a beat sweetener do anything other than snort and laugh at how they--and the President--are depicted here.

You are much better off taking stories like this as social rituals than as anything like the products of any disinterested information intermediary. IIRC, there had been a bunch of discussion about the form that Trump's now-stillborn infrastructure push would take--including much discussion of private-public partnerships--before Gary Cohn showed up on the scene...

Comments