Here’s how you know Trump is about to get squeezed
Observers often focus on the specific aspects of the political journalism landscape that are going down the toilet. Fox News is horrible. Meet The Press has become trash. MSNBC hosts Andrea Mitchell and Katy Tur are a nightmare. The New York Times and Washington Post are racing each other to the bottom. But when you look at the full list, you realize that most of the mainstream political media landscape is nothing short of garbage.
These days, if anything, the political media and pundit class tries to steer us in the opposite direction from whatever is happening at any given moment. The better Biden’s poll numbers get overall, the more loudly the (entire) media will hype the one poll number that’s good for Trump. The closer we got to Trump’s indictments, the more loudly the (entire) media insisted that he was never going to get indicted. The entire industry has become one big contrarian hot take after another, aimed at juicing ratings, with no regard for how often the entire industry is proven wrong, or how foolish it makes them all look, or how badly the public is disinformed. “But Palmer, we know all this already. Where is this going?”
A broken clock may only be right twice a day, and the rest of the time it’s useless. But if you have a clock that always falsely tells you the precise opposite of what time it is, you can actually use that to figure out what time it really is. You just have to figure out how to translate the clock’s pattern of bullshit. And it’s the same with the political media. They’re not ineptly wrong at random. They’re intentionally wrong in a very specific pattern.
We’ve seen time and again that the more loudly and hyperbolically the media starts insisting Trump has gotten away with it and we’re all doomed, it’s always because the hammer is about to get dropped on Trump. It’s like in a cartoon, where the writers always try to make things look bleakest just before the good guys win. That way it can look like it shockingly came out of nowhere, for maximum dramatic effect.
To that end, the media is suddenly ramping up the notion that Trump’s criminal trials are doomed. Why are they doing this? Because Trump just filed his Supreme Court appeal on Monday, and it’s likely doomed, and it’ll likely fail rather quickly. After that, Trump will be on criminal trial. Trump may even be on criminal trial before that, because Alvin Bragg is reportedly considering squeezing in his Trump trial while Trump’s federal appeals are finishing up.
So the whole era of “will Trump be able to push his criminal trials past the election” is now basically over. This was never a thing to begin with, because there’s no such thing as being able to magically delay your criminal trials to your liking. But the media has been milking the phony suspense for ratings for quite awhile now. And now that narrative is nearly used up.
So of course the media is responding to this not by giving up on the narrative, but by ramping it up even more cartoonishly in its final breaths. We’ve got pundits out there suggesting that Trump will be able to indefinitely delay things by requesting an en banc appeal, even though the appeals court seemingly shut down that avenue in its ruling last week, and even though Trump has already skipped over that step by filing with the Supreme Court.
And last night Rachel Maddow of all people had some nonsensical segment calling for Fani Willis to recuse herself from the Fulton County case. There is a zero percent chance that Willis will do this, of course. So this kind of segment is aimed at scaring you into believing that the case against Trump is doomed because Willis is refusing to quit. In reality the only way Willis could put this case at risk would be to quit, because that would send the case off in a number of tangential directions. But hey, let’s ignore that reality and go for the doomsday hype!
But the point here is not to gripe about how awful the entire political media and pundit class has become (and the entire political media and pundit class is indeed awful). The point is that by histrionically ramping up its doomsday hysteria this week about how Trump’s criminal trials are all doomed, the media is giving away that it knows Trump’s criminal trials are about to get underway. Remember, the political media is not a broken clock, it’s an intentionally backwards clock. All you have to do is figure out how to translate the specific misleading narratives that the media is throwing at you in any given week, and it becomes a lot easier to figure out what’s really going on. In this case, it’s the surest sign yet that Trump is about to get squeezed.
