Self fulfilling prophecy
Here’s an interesting pattern. Donald Trump has been under gag orders in various cases all year, and he’s made a point of never violating any of them. For instance, after the judge in the E. Jean Carroll trial threatened to punish Trump if he even so much as mentioned Carroll again, Trump meekly obeyed – and didn’t mention Carroll again until the day after the trial ended.
Yet even as Trump has meekly cowered in the face of every gag order, the media has falsely and misleadingly claimed over and over again that Trump has been violating his gag orders. This is so the media can then turn around and claim that Trump is “getting away with it all,” a narrative that scares people into staring at their screens and boosting ratings.
Yet after all these months of narratives falsely claiming that Trump was violating his gag orders when he wasn’t violating, now he’s violation his gag orders. He did it in the Judge Engoron case this past week, and he did again it in the Judge Chutkan case tonight. This marks a new and very different pattern for a guy who had previously spent all year abiding by gag orders.
And yet one can’t help but notice that Trump is now essentially playing into the false headlines that have already been written about him. All the headlines said he was violating his gag orders when he wasn’t, yet now he is violating his gag orders. It’s almost a self fulfilling prophecy.
In fact this is far from the first time over the years in which Trump was going about something in very meek fashion, even as the media chased ratings by falsely claiming that Trump was going about that thing in fierce fashion, only for Trump to then turn around and start doing the thing that the headlines were falsely claiming he was doing. This is a pattern.
It’s almost as if Trump starts off knowing he can’t get away with doing a certain thing, then sees headlines falsely claiming that he is getting away with that thing, falls for his own hype, and becomes emboldened to start doing that thing – only for him to come out on the wrong end of it.
This doesn’t excuse the fact that the media keeps making things up. But it is hilarious that these ratings-driven false stories about Trump seem to be what goads him into getting himself into trouble. Then again, if you saw headlines every day insisting that you had magically omnipotent powers, you might end up falling for your own hype too.
