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Kevin McCarthy doesn’t know how to deal with him.
Clearly, CNN doesn’t either.
Ditto for prosecutors.
Mitch McConnell thinks the best thing to do is pretend he does not exist.
NRSC topper Steve Daines embraces him.
Various Nevers and Never Againers make their livings off of him.
Team DeSantis is rethinking how to attack (and overtake) him.
Joe Biden simultaneously roots for him to become his 2024 foe and tries to make him the evil face of the Republican Party.
A not inconsiderable segment of the country is in thrall to him, while a majority is afflicted with the derangement syndrome named after him.
Columnists, pundits, reporters, and newsletter writers are condemned to analyze him – and give him his due for his brute political skill.
And everyone who is being honest needs to acknowledge that he is, as of now, either the most likely or second most likely person to win the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s dominating place in the current news cycle is of a piece with his overwhelming presence in our politics, media, culture, and conversation since 2015.
A day after a jury found him liable for the claims of E. Jean Carroll (and shortly after Carroll herself did a round of exuberant morning TV interviews), Trump took to a New Hampshire stage paid for by a cable news network whose eight-year history with him is both metaphor and tragedy.
And, in the crude and inevitable and necessary way in which such things are scored, Trump beat CNN decisively.
It wasn’t close.
Whatever lies he told, whatever pain he caused, however much the logic of Manhattan, Madison, Cambridge, and Santa Monica says no suburban mom could cast a(nother) ballot for that man – Trump actually scored a new substantive and psychic victory whose implications could last another fifty hours, or/and lead him inexorably back to the White House.
However high the ratings end up being, this was not, Twitter chatter and Chevy Chase fainting couches notwithstanding, an event that captured the imagination of a nation. Revulsion at what CNN did and at the cheering audience (and warm professional collegial feelings towards moderator Kaitlan Collins) mean the Dominant Media coverage is already more muted than it should be, and will likely peter out fast (with the exception of the coming columns in major newspapers and on websites, garment rendng over CNN giving Trump the platform and lamenting the dangers his appearance represents and foretells).
There will surely be demands to keep Trump off TV, off the debate stages, to not interview him ever again, and whatever other penalties folks can conjure up.
Does it matter that Trump, on CNN’s dime, promoted fiscal default and 1/6 pardons, was weaselly on Putin and abortion, and offensive on Carroll and Collins?
It matters in at least four ways.
1. It will increase the level of Trump Derangement Syndrome that, thereby, increases Trump’s chances of becoming president again.
2. It will delight a lot of folks around the country who, like the members of that Granite State debate hall audience, find it at once hilarious and richly satisfying that Trump sticks it to The Man – and because this group takes Trump seriously but not literally, we need to take this group seriously and literally.
3. It demonstrates that, as long as Trump is the frontrunner for the nomination, he is going to act in a way that the Dominant Media is pretty much powerless to address in a textbook manner.
4. It will cause the members of the Dominant Media to fight with each other, playing inexorably into Trump’s meaty hands.
I could share with you scores of Tweets from Wednesday night that, based on the identity of the tweeters and the implications of their messages, belong in a time capsule about Trump and America.
Here are just a few:
Here are the other marquee pieces of Trump-related “data” you need to focus on right now:
1. Watch the new ad/video his campaign produced. Do not underestimate the power of this message (wholly separate from election denialism, 1/6 defending, Putin loving, etc) to allow Trump to win both the nomination and the White House:
Note the repeat of his winning 2016 themes, the exploitation of Joe Biden’s vulnerabilities, and the balance between dark and light.
Swallow hard and peek at the related and rhyming press release:
2. Peruse the various Wednesday statements from the DeSantis Super PAC, taking in the nuance of the themes and, more, the strong whiff of desperation and flailing underneath the muscular attempt at confidence and bravado, all of which struck many politico pros as (1) a good sign that Team DeSantis knows it needs a new game plan and some rev; and (2) a bad sign that this fusillade seems scattered, unfocused, and likely doomed:
3. Analyze the Murdoch tea leaves in the New York Post:
4. If you think CNN is the only unindicted aider and abetter of Trump in the media, look at the way the New York Times frames the House investigation into Biden Inc:
This is the kind of headline that pushes the Red members of the Gang of 500 and lots and lots of Republicans and independents who are otherwise not inclined to be MAGA into the arms of Donald J. Trump.
The fact that the story itself chronicles some of the House investigatory results that are in fact damning to Team Biden does not solve the problem – in some ways it makes it worse.
5. . Read Rich Lowry’s mostly-deadly-serious explanation of why Trump, for now, appears unstoppable:
Trump has constructed an impenetrable political force field. In his own telling, he’s strong and a fierce fighter at the same time that he’s a victim — because his adversaries are out to get him since he’s so strong and such a fierce fighter.
Pretty much anything that happens fits in one of these two buckets: a validating strength or a validating victimization.
All of his administration’s victories, his large rallies, his successful endorsements fall in the first category of confirming Trump’s power.
The Alvin Bragg indictment — as well as all manner of negative news stories about him, other accusations and impeachments — falls into the second. If Trump weren’t such a threat to the establishment, weren’t on the front lines of the culture war, weren’t a hated figure for everyone Republicans despise and fear, the other side wouldn’t bother to charge him with crimes and otherwise malign him.
The worse things are for him, the more unfairly he’s being treated, and the more Republicans should feel obligated to rally to his side….
Another advantage Trump has is the sheer number of contentions he’s involved in. To take a small example, it’s hard to see how any other politician would possibly get away with calling the Asian American wife of another major politician “Coco Chow”; Trump does it routinely to Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s wife (and his own former Transportation secretary), and it’s not necessarily the most outlandish thing he says on any given day.
Stalin supposedly said that one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. By the same token, one controversy or allegation is memorable, dozens are a fog. The E. Jean Carroll verdict is probably destined to be a blip between the Bragg indictment and the impending indictment in Fulton County, Georgia for his effort to subvert the 2020 election.
We are surely not done with Donald Trump yet — and, just as assuredly, Trump is not done with us.
As for CNN…..
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ESSENTIAL READING
* Joe Klein’s Substack (to which you should subscribe without a doubt) suggests with his characteristic brilliance and optimism that with Trump (and Biden) history, logic, and spideysense all suggest that somethin’ gotta give:
The 2024 presidential race has been stagnant for at least three months now. It’s still a revived Trump v. an unchallenged, uninspiring Biden. That’s a very long time for a song to remain the same in American politics. But a series of political twinges has propelled me into a private tea-leaf investigation at Sanity Central; I’ve come away with an itchy zeitgeist finger.
I mean, this can’t last. People as old as Trump and Biden don’t evolve; they devolve. Does anyone think that either man will be more on his game a year from now? Will either one come up with a brash new formulation—even a turn of phrase—that enables us see the world anew? At the very least, their very same-old-sameness will occasion rampant public ennui. The usual American political game is the opposite: the ginning up of enthusiasm or anger (more the former than the latter lately), a constant attempt to stimulate interest, to eradicate boredom. The zeitgeist is impatient, and it may be especially so in a senescent bog. So I wonder: Is the conventional wisdom is about to be recast, maybe not in a big way, but in a manner that might presage larger changes to come? There are signs.
* The great Paul Kane on the vital Biden-McCarthy pesky parley:
McCarthy, now four months into his tenure as speaker, craves the respect that he believes should come with an office that is enshrined in the Constitution and next in line behind the vice president in presidential succession.
This respect issue has created an underlying tension in what has turned into a multitiered negotiation over federal spending levels and the need to lift the Treasury’s borrowing limit by early June to avoid a possible default on the nation’s more-than-$31 trillion debt….
Right now there’s a respect deficit in each direction between Biden and McCarthy….
The lack of respect has expanded deep into the rank-and-file lawmakers. Republicans have begun to talk about Biden as if he were so completely mentally incapacitated that he shouldn’t be in the Oval Office. Democrats revile McCarthy as an intellectual lightweight with no moral core who granted deep concessions to far-right conservatives to win the speaker’s gavel in January….
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TO WATCH TODAY
Both the debt ceiling/fiscal talks and the Mexican border remain areas of great and unresolved concern.
I have zero idea what will happen on the border in the next 24 hours, but sources suggest the staff-level talks on the fiscal crisis that have occurred so far are not poised to make Friday’s White House meeting of the principals some great breakthrough session. But incremental progress was made and more talks will occur before the bosses reconvene tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
Wide World of News will continue to track it all.