Will President Trump Use the Bully Pulpit?

My bet is that Trump, in using his bully pulpit, will teach American politicians from coast to coast how to communicate with our fellow citizens. And thank God for it. Here is an excerpt from a National Journal article posted at ConservativeByte.com:

President-Elect Donald Trump shows that he already has the skills and inclination to use the bully pulpit. He wll be able to talk directly to the public, and use the light of day and of reason to move his policies forward. Theodore Roosevelt was a champion at this and he did not even have the advantage of Twitter.

As Written by Charlie Cook for National Journal

A tweet by Don­ald Trump earli­er this week caused eye-rolling among people with an even curs­ory know­ledge of con­sti­tu­tion­al law. “Nobody should be al­lowed to burn the Amer­ic­an flag—if they do, there must be con­sequences—per­haps loss of cit­izen­ship or year in jail,” Trump pro­nounced. Burn­ing the flag is pretty despic­able, but it’s a form of pro­tec­ted free speech, which was made clear by Su­preme Court de­cisions in 1989 and 1990. Even uber con­ser­vat­ive Justice Ant­on­in Scalia con­curred. But the tsk-tsk­ing among elites amoun­ted to an­oth­er ex­ample of the phe­nomen­on that Salena Zito ob­served in The At­lantic back in Septem­ber: “The press takes him [Trump] lit­er­ally, but not ser­i­ously, his sup­port­ers take him ser­i­ously, but not lit­er­ally.” He says things for ef­fect, such as “there ought to be a law” or “it ticks me off when people do this.” The simple fact is that there are a lot more Amer­ic­ans who agree with Trump that people shouldn’t be burn­ing flags than there are people who are pars­ing Su­preme Court de­cisions.

But this week something else happened that got much less at­ten­tion, but ar­gu­ably is much more im­port­ant. Car­ri­er, a unit of United Tech­no­lo­gies, an­nounced that it was re­vers­ing its plan to close down an In­di­ana­pol­is fur­nace-build­ing plant that Trump had made a big fuss about, po­ten­tially sav­ing the Hoo­si­er State 1,000 well-paid man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs. Trump’s pub­lic lam­bast­ing of the planned job shift, along with be­hind-the-scenes man­euv­er­ing by the gov­ernor and Vice Pres­id­ent-elect Mike Pence, saved the day. Ap­par­ently there were a pack­age of in­cent­ives offered the com­pany if it stayed put.

Read more: ConservativeByte.com

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