Catherine Rampell has a few resolutions for the media. This one really hit home:
Don’t spend more time analyzing an idea that the president proposes than he spent coming up with it.
This one is hard, I know. Sometimes Trump says things that are just so wrong, in so many ways, that it’s difficult to resist the urge to enumerate all the details of their wrongness.
But a 4 a.m. cyberbullying toilet tweet about Kim Jong Un doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an actual, deliberate shift in diplomatic strategy. A blurted parenthetical about how he’d love to pass a middle-class tax cut, the biggest tax cut ever, doesn’t mean he seriously plans to propose such a thing. Let’s not pretend a secret plan actually exists and then conjure up tea leaves for experts to read.
Don’t impute more seriousness or thoughtfulness than ad-libbed drivel deserves.
Trump’s Twitter feed is like a chicken shit cannon from which the media is constantly trying to make chicken salad. It’s a goddam waste of time and the sooner they find a way to ignore most of it, the better for all of us.