The C Student in Chief

Donald Trump and his administration are lazy, sloppy, and lack imagination.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence and Karen Pence, clap before cutting the infamous copy-cat cake during the inaugural ball at the National Building Museum on Jan. 20 in Washington.

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.)