The mainstream media is finally admitting today that Donald Trump is about to get arrested
Throughout 2021, Palmer Report has consistently documented the developments coming out of the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal probe into Donald Trump, and the fact that the criminal indictment process against Trump is pretty far down the road. Trump is clearly going to be arrested this year. But at times it’s felt like Palmer Report was the only one bothering to cover this development.
It’s not difficult to figure out why. No one knows precisely when Trump will be indicted and arrested. In the meantime, there’s ratings gold to be had by pretending that Trump is somehow magically on track to make a political comeback in 2024, so most of the media has been hyping that nonsensical narrative – and of course that narrative would fall apart if the media admitted that Trump will be in prison by then anyway.
But today the dam finally burst. Politico is reporting that Palm Beach County officials have discussed how to handle Donald Trump’s indictment and arrest if he happens to be at Mar-a-Lago at the time. Of course this is a non-story. It’s not as if they have to do anything to prepare; Trump will be arrested and that’ll be that.
Here’s the thing, though: why is the media finally now admitting that Trump is going to be arrested? My guess is that, after having spent all year trying to scare everyone into believing Trump had “gotten away with it all,” the media now expects his arrest to come fairly soon, and doesn’t want to get caught with its pants down. So now the media is doing that thing it often does, where it takes something that is obviously going to happen and insists it’ll never happen, and then at the last minute before it happens, the media acts as if this obvious thing is suddenly coming out of nowhere.
That’s all well and good. Better late than never. Here’s the thing, though. This same Politico article also casually raises the possibility that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might just magically block Trump from being extradited to New York. To be clear, that’s not a real thing. That’s laugh out loud level fiction. DeSantis could never pull that off politically, and besides, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled awhile ago that extradition across state lines is essentially automatic.
Nonetheless, this new doomsday narrative – that Trump will magically be saved from arrest by DeSantis – has begun sweeping across social media today. Pro-Trump people are now counting on it. Anti-Trump people are now scared to death it’ll happen. And it’s not even a real thing. But that doesn’t matter, because the media has now found its new imaginary doomsday narrative to scare people into staying tuned in.
I can tell you roughly how it’ll go from here. From now until the day Trump is arrested, we’ll hear about how he magically won’t be extradited to New York. Then once he’s extradited, we’ll hear about how it’ll never go to trial. Then once the trial starts, we’ll hear about how he’ll never be convicted. Then once he’s convicted – because these are the kinds of financial charges that always result in conviction – we’ll hear about how he’ll never set foot in prison. Then once he’s in prison, the media will make up some imaginary reason for why he’s going to magically be let out of prison at any minute, and so on.
I’m not trying to be cynical here. It’s just that we’ve seen the mainstream media consistently do this over and over and over again. It’s just what they do. If they just simply admit that Trump is already locked into a path to his arrest and imprisonment, then you’ll stop being scared of him, and you’ll go watch football instead.
And so this fairly straightforward and inevitable storyline – that Trump will absolutely be arrested and he’ll end up in prison when it’s all said and done – is being widely spun into some kind of cliffhanger movie of the week where we’re continually led to believe that it’s all about to go wrong and all hope is lost.
It’s up to us as consumers of news to understand that this is how the mainstream media tries to milk us for ratings and page views. The media wants us to feel scared and hopeless, so we’ll sit there and stare at the media all day, instead of getting out there and fighting and winning political battles. We can’t let that happen to us. Trump is toast. That was a given the minute he was declared the loser of the election. Instead of fretting over his ghost, let’s go fight the next generation of evil.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report