It is an improvement that President Donald Trump has made himself many times more available for media questions than did Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden and Trump’s November election opponent Kamala Harris who notoriously made great effort to avoid reporters’ questions. Still, it would be nice if Trump told his White House employees to knock off their use of petty rules limiting media access.
Since February 13, Associated Press (AP) reporters have been barred from White House media access because the AP continued to use the term “Gulf of Mexico” after Trump declared in an executive order that the body of water should henceforth be called the “Gulf of America.” Get over it already. That’s how language works. People don’t always call things by the same name, and politicians don’t have absolute power to settle the matter. Even today, 16 decades later, battles of the Civil War are regularly called by two alternative names — one originating from use by the United States side and the other from use by the Confederate States side. Indeed, even the war itself does not have a settled name. The War Between the Sates and the War of Northern Aggression are two alternative names people use, among others. And I wonder if some reporters take a highway en route to press conferences while others take a parkway. Might White House employees consider taking a turnpike to be intolerable?
This week comes the revelation that White House employees are refusing to answer emailed questions from reporters whose emails include mention of the pronouns the writers prefer people use when referring to them. Are the White House employees so fragile that they can’t handle seeing someone noting his “preferred pronouns” are “they/them” or whatever? If so, it seems these employees are in the wrong line of work. Either that or maybe the executive branch needs to set up a safe room with teddy bears for them so they can deal with the trauma.
Then again, I may have been too caught up in recent trends in assessing this latest policy that results in evading questions. It could just be the doing of a jerk or a ploy to prevent the production of undesired reporting. Either way, it should end.
Why has Donald Trump put up with these thin-skinned policies preventing the answering of questions from people who use “wrong” or “hurtful” words that ordinary Americans deal with routinely? This evasion of reporters’ queries is ridiculous, and it stands in the way of having an open and accountable government.