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Views: The Trump Doctrine?

The Trump Doctrine?

“When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total.”  That was the (constitutionally suspect) pronouncement from the White House early in the week, as the President tried to indicate that he would force the opening of the economy on an expedited basis.

The reality of our great nation — marked by shared power, federalism, and co-equal branches of government — is much different.  As the President acknowledged by Thursday evening, the governors, in this case, will “call the shots.”

And yet, with 22 million people thrown into unemployment over the last month, there is power in what the President is saying.  It seems to us that he wants to be caught trying to open the economy and positioning the governors, and the scientists, and democrats as the forces holding us back.

Americans are desperate for leadership.  Only time will tell whether this path will win over hearts and minds, or leave people yearning for a more traditional approach.

Cyber Corner

Courtesy of Josh Zecher

Zooming Into and Out of A Crisis

Zoom, a few weeks ago, faced an existential crisis as security concerns came hand-in-hand with increased usage.  How they’ve handled this is a model of crisis management, which will be studied for years to come.

Faced with serious privacy and security concerns, Zoom has taken extraordinary steps to bolster trust. 

You can’t PR your way out of a crisis. You’ve got to walk the walk.  Messaging must be backed by action, and Zoom seems to have realized that. Zoom quickly acted with its CEO taking the hits himself on a media blitz that focused on outlining the company’s plan for solving their security and privacy issues. The company made the critical call to cease all new product feature development, and the entire engineering team now only works on privacy and security improvements.

Zoom even reached out to security expert and former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos via Twitter and hired him as a consultant. Stamos told CNBC that Zoom has had to rethink its product “from the ground up.”

Is Zoom doing enough to protect its users and its reputation? We’ll see, but they’ve bought themselves a few months to address the immediate issues.

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