Saw this one coming a mile away
When I said a couple years ago that Donald Trump would end up crippled by indictments and Ron DeSantis would collapse, most people looked at me like I was crazy. And yet here we are.
To be clear, this wasn’t “optimism” on my part. It wasn’t some longshot prediction. Based on all the available evidence, information, logic, and trends at the time, this was the obvious and probable outcome.
Trump was always on track to end up indicted in multiple jurisdictions. There was never a moment in the past two years where he wasn’t firmly on this path. Trump would have required extraordinary and improbable luck to avoid ending up indicted.
As for DeSantis, he was always going to have to step onto the national stage, and everyone was always going to see that he was a wet fish with a bizarre personality who was in way over his head, and that he had nothing in common with the imaginary DeSantis that the media had built up.
To know that Trump was always on a path to multiple indictments, all you had to do was look at the actual news developments that came out every few weeks and marked the progress of these probes, and ignore the empty doomsday hype that you were being subjected to on the days when there was no news about the probes.
To understand that DeSantis was always going to collapse the minute he hit the national stage, all you had to do was look past the media’s fictional characterization of him, and look at his actual words and actions and behavior.
No matter how many people on TV or Twitter yelled “DOJ is doing nothing,” it was still an easily disproven statement. No matter how many people in the media claimed that DeSantis was a savvier version of Trump, it was still an easily disproven statement. Repetition of a false statement doesn’t make it true. It makes it dangerous.
The kicker is that, based on your comments and replies over the past couple years, a lot of you saw all of this coming as well. Some of you figured it out on your own from the start. Some of you were convinced by my analysis along the way. But either way, a lot of you saw this coming. So why did the vast majority of media and pundit class insist the opposite was going to happen?
To me, that’s the takeaway here. Trump being crippled by indictments, and DeSantis collapsing, were easy predictions to make. They were always the highly likely outcome. Yet the majority of the industry got both those predictions emphatically wrong. In fact the majority of the industry gets the majority of its political predictions wrong the majority of the time. If I could see what was coming, and so many of you could see what was coming, so could the people who spend forty hours a week following this stuff for a living.
So why does the vast majority of the political journalism and pundit industry choose to get the vast majority of its predictions wrong? Some of them have surely decided that they can get more ratings and career attention by floating scary nonsense like “Trump will get away with it all and DeSantis is also invincible” that’ll keep people glued to their screens. Others may simply be too afraid of sticking their neck out by being the only one to make an honest prediction, when the entire rest of the industry is giving each other cover by all floating the same exact disingenuous prediction.
In any case, this all serves to underscore that if you really want to know what’s going on (and what’s going to happen) in politics, step one is to tune out almost everything you’re hearing. 98% of it is empty, and often misleading, noise. Important political news doesn’t happen most days. Yet the people on TV have to pretend like there’s major political news every day, or else you’ll turn it off. And most of the political pundits on Twitter are merely parroting whatever is being said on TV that day, in the hope it’ll get them booked on TV the next day.
It really comes down to being able to figure out which two percent of political “news stories” are actually real. For instance, when a DA emphatically says that his criminal probe is ongoing, that means it’s ongoing. It doesn’t cease to be ongoing just because one of his underlings quit, or because there were no newly reported developments in the case for awhile.
When news surfaces that a DOJ grand jury is still sending subpoenas or hearing testimony, it means that the probe is still on track to bring indictments. If nothing else new surfaces about that probe for another few weeks thereafter, it doesn’t mean that probe has come to a halt or vanished. Criminal probes are always in motion; that motion is simply not always publicly visible. When the media can’t get ahold of any new updates on a criminal probe, and it then tries to fill the empty space by implying that “nothing” is happening, this is the kind of rhetoric that can always be safely ignored. When the media suggests that prosecutors somehow don’t know how to read a calendar, or don’t know the timeframe needed for bringing a case to trial by a certain date, that kind of nonsense can be safely ignored as well.
Here’s another thing you can always safely ignore. Republicans love to publicly announce that they’re going to do this or that evil thing that’s not even possible for them to do. They do this because they know the media can’t resist “sounding the alarm” about how awful it would be if this evil thing were to happen – which scares you into thinking it might actually happen, so you’ll stare at your screen in fear and boost their ratings. The media conveniently leaves out the fact that it’s not even a real thing that could happen, or isn’t actually being pursued, or wouldn’t work even if it were tried. The Republicans and the media (including liberal leaning media outlets) often scratch each other’s backs in this way. The Republicans get to look like they’re omnipotently powerful, and the media gets its ratings. But if you’re paying close attention, you’ll see right through it, and know to ignore the entire thing.
In any case, if you saw it coming way back that Trump would end up crippled by multiple indictments and DeSantis would collapse, either because you figured it out from Palmer Report’s analysis or because you figured it out on your own, then I salute you. It means you know how to identify and filter out extraneous and misleading nonsense when you see it, and instead focus in on the salient points that are actually relevant to the outcome. It’s been my goal all along to help empower you in this way, and it’s heartening to see that so many of you get it.
