Political Analysis in Blogs

“State Of Disgrace”

     This October 19^th post to The Huffington Post by Scott Patton outlines recent reactive acts of President Trump regarding the deaths of four special forces soldiers in Niger. It has been accused that the President called the families of the fallen soldiers and claimed that the soldiers “knew what they were signing up for…” after their deaths. Patton attempts to argue why this makes President Trump into a “state of disgrace”.

     Firstly, it can be observed that the author of this post is very much in support of the opposition of Trump in this situation. He describes the soldiers as “brave” and “honorable” and describes Trump as “disgraceful” and “tarnishing”. Although Patton does a great job of using strong, descriptive language, he lacks the evidence to support these claims. He quotes that Trump said “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls” but has no reference as to when or where this quote took place. Additionally, he inserts this quote from the New York Times:

“Mr. Trump’s assertion belied a long record of meetings Mr. Obama held with the families of killed service people, as well as calls and letters, dating to the earliest days of his presidency. Before he decided to deploy 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, President Obama traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet the coffins of troops.”

     With no context, one cannot find this quote or the article it originates from.

At one point, Patton asks, “What will it take for Americans to reject Trump and his administration? What will it take for the patriotic, honest and heroic public servant to end service to Trump and party for service to country? What will it take – the republic in ashes, destined to become a contemporary Greek tragedy?” With these questions, he makes it clear that he believes Americans need to essentially wake up from state of disgrace, but with no evidence how can one even claim it is a state of disgrace?

This is certainly an opinion-based post.

Original Post:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/state-of-disgrace_us_59e911e3e4b04a400db8aff1?section=us_us-news

Political Analysis in the Media

“Trump keepsundercutting one of his central arguments for overhauling the tax system”

This political analysis by Philip Bump was posted to the Washington Post as of October 5. The article makes the argument that President Donald Trump is acting inconsistently to the data he presents.

First, Bump presents a Tweet posted by the President that states, “Stock Market hits an ALL-TIME high! Unemployment lowest in 16 years! Business and manufacturing enthusiasm at highest level in decades!” He confirms that this is true with a graphical comparison of unemployment rates from the Federal Reserve.

Secondly, he highlights a Tweet by Gizmodo’s Matt Novak, who claimed how unusual it was to be pushing tax cuts that are being sold as boosting unemployment. As well, Bump claims that Trump “cited employment as a specific goal of the policy” during the speech that announced the tax proposal.

Bump includes an excerpt from the Federal Reserve stating:

           

“Even in good times, a healthy, dynamic economy will have at least some unemployment as workers switch jobs, and as new workers enter the labor market and other workers leave it. The lowest level of unemployment that the economy can sustain is difficult to determine and has probably changed over time due to changes in the composition of the labor force, and changes in how employers search for workers and how workers search for jobs.”

He claims that perhaps President Trump’s tax cuts could create a large amount of total people in the labor pool, thus altering the statistics. This could account for some of the baby boomers that “are hitting retirement age and, well, retiring.”

All-in-all Philip Bump does a great job of relaying evidence in a clear and concise way that is easy for the reader to understand. He includes clean graphs and imbedded links to throughout the analysis. On the flip side, there is not a lot of contextual information regarding the details of the tax proposal that would lead into his overall arguments. He also writes of a speech, given by the President, as a source of evidence; however the point could have been made clearer if mention had been made of the exact quote or location of the quote within the source.

Overall, this analysis was pleasantly presented, but could have been more specific in the retrieval of data.

Original Analysis: 

 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/05/trump-keeps-undercutting-one-of-his-central-arguments-for-overhauling-the-tax-system/?utm_term=.e621c1188d71>