What surprised [lefty media] Trump-watchers most in his first 6 months

In our 100 days report card back in April, Jim VandeHei and I noted that one of Trump's "misses" was: "Little personal growth in office" — a loose style and resistance to structure that leaves White House aides insecure, and created internal inefficiencies and blind spots.

As Trump approaches the six-month mark on Thursday (Day 182, with 1,280 till the next Inauguration Day), that factor is still hampering his presidency, one-eighth of the way into this term.

We asked several top Trump-watchers what has surprised them most about the first six months.

Chris Wallace, anchor of "Fox News Sunday," writes: "What's been most surprising to me is how little Trump has changed as President. He has the same strengths and the same weaknesses he's always had. Washington certainly hasn't bent to his will. And he hasn't bent to the ways of Washington."

Maureen Dowd: "I marvel at Donald Trump's talent for cliffhangers. It rivals that of Dickens. Except that Trump's daily dramas are invariably self-destructive — legislatively, politically, legally and grammatically. It's not that easy to be in the center of a special counsel probe within six months of taking office. It took Nixon until his second term. (And this is the only time you will ever hear Trump compared to Dickens. After all, it is the worst of times and ... it is the worst of times.)"

Michael Wolff, author and columnist: "That, in the face of the onslaught, he seems to be enjoying himself as much as he is."

Maggie Haberman: "I'm most surprised he hasn't set foot in NYC since mid-January."

NBC's Chuck Todd: "I guess I'm surprised he didn't make more of an effort to develop a personal relationship with Schumer and Pelosi. Culturally, he's more familiar with them and knew the two of them more superficially than any of the GOP leaders. I didn't expect much of a Democratic outreach, but I thought he'd attempt a little wining and dining of those two, simply because he had that earlier connection back when he was a donor."

ABC's Jon Karl, who covered Trump in New York: "That he has held only one real press conference, and has never set foot in the White House briefing room. ... And that he has done so few interviews outside of Fox News. ... This is the candidate who loved engaging the press so much that he turned his primary victory nights into press conferences, which we've never seen before."

Josh Green of Bloomberg Businessweek, author of "Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency" (out tomorrow): "What's surprised me most is how quickly Trump abandoned the working-class coalition that won him the GOP nomination. ... Had he pursued something like infrastructure instead [of health], he might've built a bipartisan populist coalition and tied pro-labor Democrats in knots."

Ben Smith, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief: "That he's been so bad at the game of buying reporters' favor with access." Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax: "Someday historians will join me in looking back in awe at how Donald Trump wielded the power of the 'bully pulpit' like no other president ... [f]rom unscripted press avails to thunderous tweets."

Noah Shachtman, executive editor of The Daily Beast: "I guess I'm most surprised that people thought a 70-year-old, self-employed man would remake himself once he got to Washington."

What has surprised you? Drop me a note: mike@axios.com. If your answer surprises me, I'll share it with the AM family.

Leftwinger Michael Allen (born June 21, 1964) is an American [leftwing] political journalist. He is the co-founder and executive editor of [leftwing] Axios and former chief political reporter for [leftwing] Politico. While at [leftwing] Politico, he wrote the daily Playbook; in April 2010, in reference to his frequent correspondence with White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the [leftwing] New York Times called him "The Man The White House Wakes Up To."

Prior to joining [leftwing] Politico for its 2007 launch, he worked at numerous other [leftwing] publications, including [leftwing] Washington Post, the [leftwing] New York Times and [leftwing] Time.

In November 2015, Allen made an apology after the website Gawker reported that he offered to let Chelsea Clinton screen interview questions in advance of a proposed interview. The offer was made in a January 2013 email exchange between Allen and Hillary Clinton's aide Philippe Reines. He also promised in the email that the interview would be "no surprises" and "no risk."

Politico Stonewalls Mike Allen Payola Scandal

By Jonathan Chait December 3, 2013
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/politico-stonewalls-mike-allen-payola-scandal.html

In the fifties, a bunch of rock stations got caught taking money from music producers to give their artists airtime. The “Payola” scam, as it was called, was sufficiently outrageous to become a major national scandal.

Last month, Washington Post reporter Erik Wemple reported that Politico’s Mike Allen is running a similar scam — accepting lucrative payments from advertisers and lending his editorial voice to hyping, and sometimes parroting, their agenda. Given the relative importance of national politics vis-à-vis rock music, this struck me as a potentially career-ending revelation. Instead, Politico has ignored the report and carried on as if nothing at all were amiss.

But Politico couldn’t avoid all interviews forever, and in the course of appearing on “The Brian Lehrer Show” to hype Politico’s new Capital New York venture, CEO, former editor, and Allen co-author Jim VandeHei was asked about the payola allegations. His reply is a comical stream of evasive tripe:

Yeah, I thought the piece was nonsense, which is why we didn’t play ball with him on it. I mean, Mike Allen has written Playbook now 365 days a year for six years. We’ve done, what, thousands of Playbooks, which has had hundreds of thousands of items. I’m sure he could find any pattern he wants to if he wanted to dissect all the Playbook entries that we’ve had over seven years. Mike Allen is one of the best reporters that I’ve known in Washington, one of the fairest, has the sort of highest ideals of anybody I know. So the product is rock-solid, it’s silly to insinuate that — like, why would we do that? There’s no business interest to do it. Mike would have no business interest to do it.

VandeHei begins by calling the report “nonsense” without explicitly denying it. He asserts that a reporter “could find any pattern he wants to” in Allen’s prodigious output. Really? Any pattern? A pattern of support for Russian strongmen? A pattern of furtive endorsements of anarcho-syndicalism? Even if this were true, it misses the point altogether. One might analyze the patterns of a particular disk jockey and discover all sorts of peculiar preferences, but the only pattern that really matters is a pattern of giving favorable coverage to interests that are paying him. VandeiHei does not deny that Allen has done that.

Now, one possible defense of Allen is that what appears to be simple payola is actually a more sociologically complex phenomenon. Allen, as Wemple reports, has personal friendships with many of his sponsors, uses them as sources, and generally shares their point of view on most issues even while failing to acknowledge he has a point of view at all. This is less a defense than a concession that Allen is so hopelessly embedded within the Establishment that he can’t cover it in a remotely fair way. (This is exactly the argument I made.)

VandeHei’s final defense verges on parody: Allen, he argues, has “no business interest” in giving favorable treatment to advertisers. There is the fact that advertisers pay him $35,000 a week, or up to $1.8 million a year. If those clients realize that their paid advertisements also buy them favorable coverage in Playbook, that would make them dramatically more interested in paying Allen’s exorbitant rates.

Granted, VandeHei may be getting at the fact that the exposure of this seedy relationship would be a risky proposition that might devalue the currency of Playbook. But for that to be true, the disclosure that Allen is systematically providing favorable coverage to his advertisers would have to develop into a massive scandal that taints the Allen brand. That hasn’t happened at all.

Allen and Politico have instead simply lurched blithely forward. Their strategy of pretending the payola allegations don’t exist has worked brilliantly, from a business perspective. Given the reality that Politico has suffered little to no reputation damage from the scandal, it seems like selling favorable coverage, whatever the ethical merits, is in fact a brilliant business strategy.

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