Shoddy Journalism

A brief article at the Daily Mail on how President Trump is undoing what his predecessor tried to accomplish over his eight year tenure illustrates why one must approach what one reads in the media with a critical eye. The writer begins with this lede:

Brick by brick, the demolition job has begun: since taking office less than a year ago, Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the legacy of Barack Obama. Climate, free trade, health care, immigration, foreign policy -- the 45th US president has set about undoing just about everything done by the 44th.

All new presidents, of course, break with their predecessor once in the Oval Office, especially if they come from a rival political party. But what is striking is how systematic the hammer blows to Obama's legacy have been.

And rather than throw his weight behind new policies or projects, Trump has shown a willful desire to unpick, shred and erase everything his predecessor accomplished.

Well, why should President Trump be enacting new policies and projects when the old policies are stifling both our economic, political and religious freedom and diminishing the security of our nation? The assumption here seems to be that a president should allow whatever policies his predecessor enacted to remain in place, no matter how toxic those policies may be to the economic and social well-being of our people. Trump is wise to rid us of impediments to our national safety and flourishing imposed by the Obama administration before he moves on to advocate for other programs.

It's worth noting that each time he buries one of the reforms of the man who sat before him at the "Resolute desk," Trump sounds more like a candidate than a president.

"Reforms" is a word intended to persuade the reader that President Obama's executive orders were wise and needful and that President Trump's EOs are spiteful and reckless. In fact, a number of Mr. Obama's "reforms" were either unwise, illegal or usurpations by the executive branch of authority granted by the Constitution to the legislature. Undoing them simply returns us to the rule of law rather than the arbitrary rule of one man.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership? Within days of taking office, Trump signed an order pulling America out of the free trade accord, the fruit of eight years of negotiations between 12 Asia-Pacific countries, from Chile to Canada and Japan.

"We're going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken everybody out of our country and taken companies out of our country, and it's going to be reversed," Trump said.

If Trump can rescind this deal it's only because it was never codified into law by Congress. The Obama administration signed off on it on its own, but the question that the article never raises is not whether Trump is undoing Obama's agreement but rather whether this agreement and others should be undone. If they should then what Trump is doing is good, if they shouldn't then what he's doing is unwise.

The Paris climate accord? Obama played a leading role in attaining that milestone in the effort to combat global warming.

Trump pulled out of the agreement signed by 195 countries, claiming that it "punishes the United States" and declaring: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

Again, Trump could not pull us out of this agreement if Congress had approved it. Is it a good deal for the country or isn't it? Why didn't Congress get to act on it? Those are the questions to which the reader deserves an answer, but the article simply passes them by.

What about Obamacare, the signature legislative achievement of Obama's first term? After trying in vain to get Congress to repeal it, Trump is now working to bring about its collapse through the regulatory process.

What Trump has done here is rescind subsidies to big insurance companies that were not provided for in the Affordable Care Act, which Obama unilaterally granted and which a federal judge had declared to be illegal. You wouldn't know that, though, from reading this article.

And the Iranian nuclear accord? The bid to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon in return for a lifting of sanctions more than any other came to represent Obama's approach to world affairs.

"This deal will have my name on it," the Democratic president said shortly before it was concluded. "Nobody has a bigger personal stake in making sure that it delivers on its promise."

While Trump has stopped short of tearing up the Iran deal, as he threatened on the campaign trail, on Friday he warned he could do so "at any time," raising doubts about the fate of an accord born of years of painstaking diplomacy.

Even so, Iran has been cheating on the deal from the day they signed it, a deal that once again, Congress never explicitly approved. Iran is on the road to possessing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Having already threatened to use them once they have the power to do so, a deal that allows for their acquisition is exceedingly foolish, but there's no discussion in the article of the wisdom of the agreement, no explanation of why it should not be abrogated, just the assumption that if it's an agreement, and if it was arrived at painstakingly and signed onto with other countries, then it must be good.

Historian Jeffrey Engel ... sees no equivalent in recent decades to Trump's systematic application of the simple principle that "if the other guy liked it, it must be bad." To Engel, the explanation is that Trump's electoral base "never accepted fully Barack Obama as their president."

"There was a move among Obama's opponents to delegitimize him and to say that this man is not really president and consequently anything that he did, Trump's base is ready to get rid of," said Engel, who heads Southern Methodist University's center for presidential history in Dallas, Texas.

The possibility that President Obama's lurch toward the socialist left and that his embrace of policies which would diminish America's freedom, influence and power are sincerely rejected by a plurality of Americans as unwise is not even considered by either Professor Engel or the writer of the Daily Mail piece. The dismantling of Obama's executive orders is portrayed as mere spite and vengefulness, while the possibility that it is in fact an honest attempt to pull us out of a national "death spiral" after eight years of national vertigo is blithely ignored.

The Daily Mail has given us in this article a shoddy, careless piece of journalism.