White House report card: Even our Republican strategists say there’s no good news this week

A gossip column about who's fighting to be the next press secretary isn't news, it's a parlor game, and the fact that it's dominating "insider" coverage this week tells you more about the press corps than it does about the White House. When your own strategists can't find a silver lining, that's worth noting. But the framing here matters just as much as the substance, and the substance, from what's actually reported, is thin.

We've seen this movie before. A slow news week gets dressed up as a "bad week" because anonymous Republican operatives grumbled to a reporter on background. That's not accountability journalism, that's mood-reading dressed up as analysis. If there were real substantive failures this week, tell us what they are: a policy reversal, a broken promise, a legislative loss. Instead we get vibes, attributed to unnamed strategists who may or may not represent anyone beyond themselves.

None of this means the administration is above criticism. It should be judged on tariffs, on border numbers, on what actually gets done for working families, not on whether cable news likes the personnel drama of the week. The obsession with staffing announcements and win-loss scorecards is a Beltway habit that outlasts every administration, left or right, because it's easier to write than digging into what a policy actually does to people's lives.

If the press secretary search is genuinely chaotic, fine, report that plainly and let readers judge. But dressing up a slow week of palace intrigue as a referendum on the whole administration is lazy, and readers can tell the difference between real scrutiny and manufactured drama.