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Today, Donald Trump, for the second time, allowed video coverage of a policy/legislation discussion meeting. That is something he's done more than other POTUSes, AFAIK. I think all executive branch, except for national security policy discussion, policy discussion/negotiation -- strategizing/tactic planning, visioneering, analysis, policy design and implementation planning -- should be televised, or at least videotaped from start to finish, so citizens can know what their elected leaders are thinking, in full rather than just the sound bites.
In the puzzle that is governmental and political transparency, having open-meetings a piece, and it's one I think should remain in place for all policy discussions, be they across branches or within them. Indeed were I to have my way, no public official would be permitted to have any "unpublished" and/or unrecorded policy conversations.
As for the meeting itself, well, I wouldn't call it an effective or productive meeting vis-a-vis the public policy matter it ostensibly addressed. I mean, really, four of the nation's top government principals attended a meeting and didn't so much as come out of it with a "roadmap," no "next steps" for how and what the four of them would do to advance toward achieving some discrete set of shared goals.
No surprise that outcome. It's really the only thing that could have happened give that the parties to the meeting viewed the meeting's purpose completely differently. In other words, the participants weren't on the same page about why they were there and what they were supposed to accomplish.
Other meeting thoughts/observations:
In the puzzle that is governmental and political transparency, having open-meetings a piece, and it's one I think should remain in place for all policy discussions, be they across branches or within them. Indeed were I to have my way, no public official would be permitted to have any "unpublished" and/or unrecorded policy conversations.
As for the meeting itself, well, I wouldn't call it an effective or productive meeting vis-a-vis the public policy matter it ostensibly addressed. I mean, really, four of the nation's top government principals attended a meeting and didn't so much as come out of it with a "roadmap," no "next steps" for how and what the four of them would do to advance toward achieving some discrete set of shared goals.
No surprise that outcome. It's really the only thing that could have happened give that the parties to the meeting viewed the meeting's purpose completely differently. In other words, the participants weren't on the same page about why they were there and what they were supposed to accomplish.
- Chuck and Nancy saw the meeting as a conversation purposed on finding common ground about funding so as to avert a government shutdown.
- Trump saw the meeting as a conversation purposed on getting his wall funded, and the government shutdown was, to him, but a lever for "squeezing" concordance.
- All three of them viewed the meeting as a PR/"optics," thus political opportunity.
- There was no structure to the meeting. That may as well have been a cocktail party conversation rather than a meeting. That was Trump's fault; he was the meeting leader/caller.
Other meeting thoughts/observations:
- Why was Pence there? He didn't say a word and he wasn't taking notes. He was completely useless in that meeting. There were any number of other things he could have been doing, at the very least inserting himself to get the three principals on one page with regard to something.
- Terrible meeting dynamics/decorum --> The principals in the meeting cut each other off and didn't always look at the speaker.
- Trump didn't treat Chuck and Nancy as peers and partners with whom he's seeking to collaborate to obtain a win-win solution/meeting outcome.
- Truly, if any of the executive meetings I called, and to which I invited attendees, during my career were to have transpired with the dynamics and ineffectiveness that meeting did, the client, my staff, and my in-firm peers would have begun, for good reason, to doubt my ability to lead, my coherence and my comprehension of the matters at hand and that we were there to advance toward resolution.
- Somebody dropped the ball as goes having the "meeting before the meeting" (MBTM)...MBTMs are what meeting leaders ensure their staff have with "whomever" to ensure that actual meeting participants arrive at the meeting on the same page, prepared, and prepared to achieve one or more specific outcomes. That didn't happen and that it didn't is a failing of the principal, although one'd think at the level of POTUS, VPOTUS, and Congressional Minority Leaders, the staff would have known to execute the MBTM process and have, not later than CoB yesterday, provided the principals with a status of that process.