This is the tea-leaf administration. So far President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t hold press conferences, because apparently it is too much a bother to explain the incoming government’s plans to We the People. Everyone understands that Trump “conned” voters and the things Trump said he would do during the campaign bear no relationship whatsoever to what his administration actually will do. And no one – even the Trump people — know what they actually will do.

The press is left perching across the street from Trump Tower, spying on who is going in and out to try to figure out who might be in the incoming administration and what they might or might not do. Everyone is left reading tea leaves to try to discern what is coming.

And the tea leaves tell us that working people are in for a hard time.

In 2015 President-“Elect” Donald Trump insisted that American workers’ wages are “too high.” Now Trump and the entire Republican apparatus are getting ready to use their newly-gained power to do something about it.

Tea-leaf-readers are warning that what we are already seeing and hearing from the Trump crowd should, as Senator Bernie Sanders put it in a Washington Post op-ed titled “Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump“, should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.” Sanders explans, “who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America.”
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Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this, and it showed in her early efforts to address it. Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest.

It did not. Instead, email-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.
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