Axios’ Jonathan Swan inadvertently revealed how clueless, out of touch, ignorant, and in over their heads some of his trusted White House sources were on Wednesday evening when he disclosed that many White House operatives have never heard of The American Prospect magazine.
Swan was reporting on the jaws that were apparently on the floor at the White House when operatives read White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon’s “interview” with left-wing Prospect editor Robert Kuttner in which Bannon defended Trump and called out the media’s sensationalistic coverage of Charlottesville; aggressively called for the United States to confront China on trade to preserve its standing as the world’s superpower; revealed there was no good military solution on the Korean Peninsula; eviscerated globalists like Gary Cohn who have been working with The Swamp to stymie trade policies that would benefit American workers; and bashed “ethno-nationalist” white supremacists as “clowns” who needed to be “crushed.”
In Swan’s second draft of his story, he conveniently deleted his rather telling and embarrassing revelation about his White House sources that was in his first draft.
For White House operatives to not have known what The American Prospect was is beyond astonishing and shows how unqualified Swan’s sources are to fight for Trump’s agenda against the legacy media and Democrats or help convince Democrats to join Trump on issues like infrastructure, which is something Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reportedly feared Trump would do at the start of his administration.
The Prospect, which was founded by Kuttner, Robert Reich, and Paul Starr, is where liberals go to test out ideas before their politicians adopt them.
Devil’s Bargain author Joshua Green, Dana Goldstein, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Nick Confessore, Garance Franke-Ruta, Jonathan Chait, Josh Marshall, Harold Meyerson, Michael Tomasky, and Joel Conason have all written for the Prospect, which is a magazine Republican operatives should be reading or at least be familiar with in order to better understand liberals and more effectively argue with them. It is advantageous, after all, if one knows the other side’s arguments better than they do.
For the last decade, one milquetoast GOP operative after another has gotten schooled on legacy media outlet after another. And in many cases, it was because they were unfamiliar with the other side’s arguments. Republican operatives who are unaware of the Prospect are like college football scouts who do not know one of their rival team’s top recruiting hubs. Unfortunately, the failure to understand the other side’s politicians and arguments is why Republicans churn out the kinds of operatives and bobbing heads who actually thought Jeb Bush would have been the strongest candidate against Hillary Clinton and believed Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the best tandem to defeat President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
In other words, that is why these types of operatives and advisers keep losing.
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