If the old “man bites dog” journalism-school definition of news still applies, it was barely newsworthy when Donald Trump began gnawing on China’s leg upon becoming president-elect. This is not to compare China to a giant canine or to ignore the fact of life that China-United States is a bilateral rivalry that must managed skillfully.
It’s just to say that Trump’s decision to speak on the telephone to the newly elected president of Taiwan shouldn’t have surprised any sentient American, let alone the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate.
Ah, but it did. The phone call and subsequent Trump tweets induced widespread alarm in elite newsrooms and in the predictable precincts of social media: Take away that man’s Twitter account! What is he trying to do, start World War III?!
It’s clear that Donald J. Trump engenders strong emotions and that these feelings haven’t abated since he was elected president. But you’d think his critics might have learned by now that throwing tantrums in response to anything he does or says can make the tantrum-thrower look ridiculous.
The morning Trump tweeted that burning the American flag should be punishable by jail time, for instance, the anchors on CNN and MSNBC went apoplectic. Their outrage lasted about as long as it took Fox News to unearth a similar 2005 flag-burning ban authored by one Hillary Rodham Clinton — when she was in the Senate. Oops.
The knee-jerk reaction to Trump’s Taiwan gambit was even odder. The gist was that because Trump had irritated the Chinese government and alarmed the State Department, we, too, should be worried. But that line of argument ignored the entirety of Trump’s campaign, and seven decades’ worth of lessons about relations between the White House and the State Department.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
