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GELFAND’S WORLD - Want to know what I wish? I wish that we had a local news station that gave out real news without ever, ever showing Donald Trump or playing his voice. I think I have a lot of fellow citizens who would join me in this request. And while they are at it, let's have some hard news. Have you noticed that the details of the Ukraine War have pretty much fallen off the radar?
And while we're on the topic, what's this recent obsession with presenting what feels like two-hour reports on the weather? Here's what's relevant: It rains or it doesn't. It's hot, warm, mild, or cold. It's going to be a Santana wind condition or not. If it's desperately important to get all the different areas in on the forecast, it's sufficient to present a chart with the expected highs and lows.
If the local stations were to do the weather in the 3 minutes that it would actually take, maybe the mayor wouldn't be so confused about it the next time around.
If you need justification for the above remarks, just think of the following: What goes on in Korea, Japan, and China are important to our economy and our national security. What goes on in European elections has a significant effect on how trade and international security decisions occur. That car chase may be fun to watch, but it is not of overall importance -- if it were, the television stations would do follow-ups showing the arraignments and sentencing of the various perpetrators. Notice how there never is that follow-up?
A New Gate
You have to be in your 50s to have even been born when the original "gate" happened. A group who worked for President Richard Nixon committed a burglary of the Democratic headquarters which happened to be at the Watergate hotel in Washington. As the news developed, writers referred to the Watergate break-in and this wording eventually morphed into the Watergate scandal and eventually was referred to simply as Watergate.
It's an amazing thing, this English language of ours. Pretty much every successive scandal of note has had the term "gate" appended to it. So now we have SignalGate or perhaps Signal-gate. We are in an era where you can scandalize without physically breaking into a brick-and-mortar structure. We can now Gate the name of an internet service.
And as so often happens, the news media are mesmerized by the less important part of the story. When the Secretary of Defense lies about the lack of war planning information that went public, the media jumps on the bait. But once you read the full transcript (which isn't all that long, so take a look here) you should realize that there is a bigger story.
To introduce that argument, I will refer to a story from the days of WWII, at a moment when the U.S. government was trying to figure out how to fight the Japanese. At one point, the American war planners brought together a group of human anthropologists and asked them to provide whatever insights they could about the Japanese. You can read a book length report written by those anthropologists (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword) if you are interested in their conclusions.
What is significant about this story is that war planners are as interested in how an opposing nation's leaders think and what they know as they are about the particular details of any single military operation. The CIA studies Putin and Xi and the leaders of friendly countries. We parlay with all of them at one time or another, so it's useful to have some feel for what they want in any bargaining situation.
So, suppose you as an adversary would like to develop an idea of how America's leaders will respond in any future situation. In a word, how do they think about things? The idea is to have a broader idea of what their intellectual limits are, what their overall education is, what their temperament is, and for this administration, how far any one leader is willing to go to resist something proposed by the president.
You could try to insinuate spies into this country, or read every word ever written by the leadership, or whatever. You wouldn't necessarily gain the insight you would like to have, but this is how opposing countries study their opponents.
Or, in March of 2025, you could just read the SignalGate transcript which is available to the whole world and probably was available to the opposition countries even earlier, considering how sloppy this administration has been about national security. You can gain a good feel for how a large collection of cabinet officers and national leaders think.
If you would like a summary of the timeline and the remaining details, the Wikipedia story can be seen here.
The Repeat of an Old Lesson
If you saw the comments made by Secretary of Defense Hegseth, you would have noticed that his first reaction was to deny and to attack the journalist who had broken the story. It's a technique borrowed from the Trump approach. Then, when Trump himself was asked, he characterized the Atlantic, among other things, as going broke. It's a Trump characteristic that he won't respond to an opposing source on the basis of its veracity or its merit, but merely in terms of its success in business. Often enough, he is outright lying, as when he wants to claim that the New York Times is failing. It is the scope of his criticism that is so strange. He simply is unable to consider the source of a critical story in terms of its known journalistic integrity or its record over the years. There is something of the ironic of course when this serial bankruptcy artist claims that his critics are failing in business. Projection thy name is Donald.
More Tariff Threats
Early in this presidency, I suggested that each Trump threat should be met by ignoring it for a week. Trump is so on-again-off-again that it is useless to consider any threat in the literal sense at the beginning. Maybe his henchmen will deport tens of thousands of people in the first week, but -- as the record now shows -- they probably won't. Maybe Trump will install ruinous tariffs on everything Canadian, or maybe he won't.
The financial markets seem to have adopted much the same attitude. The evidence comes from the Wednesday threat to place 25% tariffs on all automotive imports beginning April 2. If the stock market were taking this threat seriously, industrial stocks would be in free fall. As of this writing, Ford is down a little and most everything else is pretty much holding its own. That is not a panicked response to a game changing event.
The market has discounted the Trump presidency, at least in terms of short term threats which, as often as not, are pulled back a day or two later. You might say that the big money doesn't believe what he says. Welcome to the club.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
