CPB and the Deep State

The Trump Administration’s primary weakness is the absence of a conscious governing philosophy. That is manifest in the Trump Administration’s selection of Agency heads and on the Board’s of lesser agencies. To be sure, Trump Administration’s policies on immigration originate in the pronouncements of Enoch Powell or the admiration for career military that he acquired as a young cadet at New York Military Academy, but these are accidental, not reasoned, attitudes.

As an example, take a look at President Trump’s appointments to the Board of Directors of the  Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Chairman Bruce Ramer, Vice Chair Laura Ross, Ruby Calvert, Miriam Hellreich and Robert Mandell are President Trump’s appointees. Their biographies are sanitized to exclude any evidence of partisan activity but read closely.  These appointees could have been chosen by any former Democrat President.

You have to go as far back to the nomination of W. Allan Wallis, appointed by President Richard Nixon, to find a CPB appointee with conservative credentials. Wallis was a free market economist.

Or. as late as 1981, during the Reagan Administration when National Review editor, Richard Brookhiser. was appointed to serve a term ending in 1988.  Significantly, during Brookhiser’s term of service, CPB authorized a study of “content analysis” of the ideological slant of public-TV program.

If President Trump bid for reelection fails on November 3, that defeat may be attributed to the President’s lack of understanding of how deep is the “Deep State” nor how to control its vices.