All that hyperventilating for nothing
On Thursday the SDNY, a division of the DOJ, turned over hundreds of pages of documents to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and defendant Donald Trump. This prompted the judge and Bragg to agree to the possibility of pushing back the start of Trump’s March 25th trial by a few weeks.
This was obviously a non-story on its face. It doesn’t change anything if the trial starts in March or if it starts in April. Also, this was only a possible delay. And if Alvin Bragg isn’t upset by the potential delay, why should anyone else be?
But this non-story quickly got spun into all kinds of hyperbolic doomsday nonsense on social media, egged on by the performance artists on MSNBC and CNN. By the end of the day most observers were under the false impression that SDNY was conspiring to help Trump by hanging onto these relevant documents until the last minute, and that Attorney General Merrick Garland was too weak to keep it from happening, or even in on the sinister plot. Garland was trending as one outrage addict after another angrily foamed at the mouth about him. There was also a prevailing narrative about another supposed batch of documents coming later that was going to delay the trial even further. People rushed to declare that the trial would never happen. All hope was lost.
Then reality intervened. On Friday Alvin Bragg announced while SDNY is planning to send more documents later, none of them appear to be relevant to the Trump trial. So there won’t be any further delays. The trial judge also made clear on Friday that the “thirty day delay” would in fact not delay the trial by thirty days. Instead it would push the trial back to thirty days from yesterday, meaning it would start around April 15th instead of the originally planned March 25th.
So now we’ve gone from a supposed “indefinite delay” and a trial that “might well never happen” to a mere three week delay at most. So much for all those outraged conspiracy theories. Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial is absolutely happening, and it’s happening next month. And there’s no massive SNDY / Merrick Garland conspiracy to help Trump after all.
It’s the latest reminder that social media is an absolute disaster when it comes to people stating (and overstating) their worst fears as if they were fact. It’s also a reminder that the vast majority of people in the political journalism / pundit / analyst industry are willfully egging on this kind of hyperbolic doomsday insanity in the name of chasing ratings and retweets.
Meanwhile back in the real world, Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial is now more firmly on track than ever. So why did all those defeatist doomsday hysteria and conspiracy theory stuff on Thursday need to happen? It didn’t. It was all a complete waste of time, over a “crisis” that didn’t even exist.
