Slate - "The C Student in Chief... Donald Trump and his administration are lazy, sloppy, and lack
imagination
by Katy Waldman
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/02/donald_trump_is_our_c_student_in_chief.html
Back in 2009, web designer Matthew Ipcar, who’d created change.gov for the Obama campaign, led a small team tasked with relaunching the White House website. “We started from scratch,” he recalled. After drafting a 40-page memo articulating their vision, goals, and themes, Ipcar and his crew overhauled navigation, optimized typefaces, added image galleries, rewrote the presidential biographies, and introduced a “share your thoughts” section that encouraged users to interact with executive staff. “In the end,” Ipcar said, “we built something different from any previous head of state’s online presence. We were really proud.” (Disclosure: Ipcar is married to Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg.)
Eight years later, Ipcar and his former colleagues are less proud than dismayed. Trump’s administration has preserved the shell of the site while gutting it from within. Rather than construct a new template, the Trump administration focused on removing pages about LGBTQ rights, criminal justice reform, health care policy, and climate change. Trump’s web wizards also temporarily disappeared the judiciary branch from the portal’s Government section.
“I feel responsible for designing this beautiful thing,” Ipcar told me. “But it’s like a really good building—it has rooms and furniture and portraits, and it’s solid and it works. And now this other man is living in it.” The new guy seems like a bit of a slob. He’s careless when it comes to standardizing fonts and formatting across multiple pages. His copy is rife with grammatical errors and poor phrasing. “Art therapy is facilitated by art therapists who use art media as a method of treatment,” begins a sentence in Karen Pence’s online biography. The site now reads like an extremely patriotic fifth-grade book report. “Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of the United States,” the president’s official bio explains. “He believes the United States has incredible potential and will go on to exceed anything that it has achieved in the past. His campaign slogan was Make America Great Again, and that is what he intends to do.”
Slate design director Jason Santa Maria describes the Trump iteration of the White House website as “brochure-ware,” a form of “one-way communication.” The Obama administration’s digital hub invited users to “send questions, comments, concerns, or well-wishes to the President or his staff using this form.” The new WhiteHouse.gov asks you to “follow President Trump on Twitter at @POTUS.”
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“He believes the United States has incredible potential and will go on to exceed anything that it has achieved in the past.
To some degree, he might be onto something there, but not in the way he thinks.
Downfall. Depression beyond comprehension. Deaths numbering in the millions or billions perhaps. Life on Earth taking a giant leap in its path towards a 6th mass extinction.
Shall I go on? 
