Testing the President

A simple way to evaluate behavior

President Trump has barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House because, he says, they report “FICTION and LIES.” The three organizations sued today.

A president does not get to choose which news organizations cover him according to whether he likes their coverage. The whole point of an independent press is that the government does not decide what gets reported about it.

There will be plenty to say about the First Amendment questions raised by that decision. But the president’s attack on those who cover him and my recent piece in the Atlantic made me think that we should spend some time thinking about how we should judge what the president chooses to do?

In my Atlantic piece, “The Pinball President,” I argued that a president’s enormous capacity to attract attention is a power that requires discernment and stewardship. It is also a rough proxy for his priorities.

One way to evaluate a president is to apply the Eisenhower matrix test.

Dwight Eisenhower famously distinguished between the urgent and the important. The Eisenhower Matrix that grew from that distinction divides work into four categories and quadrants:

Every time the president speaks, posts, stages an event, launches an initiative or directs the machinery of government toward something, we can ask ourselves: Which quadrant is this?

The question isn’t whether the press approves of the president’s priorities. It is whether the president’s priorities correspond to the responsibilities of the office and the needs of the country.

That is one way to test the argument I made in “The Pinball President.” And it has an advantage at a moment when the president calls unfavorable coverage propaganda: You don’t have to take the press’s word for it.