So much for the Trump 2024 train

| 9:09 am EDT April 13, 2022
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Yesterday the DOJ sent a letter to the House Oversight Committee confirming that it’s investigating Donald Trump for having taken classified documents with him when he left office. This comes two weeks after the separate news broke that the DOJ has had a January 6th grand jury targeting Trump world for months. This is the kind of news we’ve all been hoping for. But there is one downside to this news.

The mounting confirmation that the DOJ is investigating Trump makes it a lot harder for the mainstream media to sell its current “Trump 2024” hype for ratings. Who’s going to believe that a guy who’s under federal criminal investigation on multiple fronts is going to be some kind of serious threat in 2024? So the media has to downplay this DOJ news, in order to keep the “Trump 2024” ratings grab alive for now.

This is all surely fine by the DOJ, which doesn’t want the media poking around in its ongoing probes, and doesn’t appear to care about the media’s criticism for supposedly not doing enough. But if the media’s job is to inform the public about this stuff, it’s largely doing the opposite.

Of course there’s the other doomsday narrative that some circles of the mainstream media are pushing, which is that because Trump is under DOJ investigation, it’ll “embolden” him and now he’ll definitely wave a magic wand and win in 2024 automatically. These are the same media folks who spent four years telling us that Trump’s each devastating setback in office was merely going to “embolden” him to automatically win in 2020.

The media doesn’t believe any of this nonsense, of course. But they’ve already decided their best way to rack up ratings and page views is to hype “Trump 2024” while they still can (before he’s ultimately arrested, croaks, bails due to “health” issues, or however his 2024 prospects end). Just as the media decided up front that it would spend the entire 2016 election milking “Hillary’s emails” for ratings, and that it would spend the 2020 election milking “Trump will stay in office even if he loses” for ratings. They pick a ratings friendly narrative and milk it for the entire cycle if they can.

So the fact that Donald Trump is under confirmed DOJ criminal investigation is only going to, paradoxically, cause the media to hype the Trump 2024 narrative even more hyperbolically in the coming days and weeks. After all, the media now has to shout “Trump 2024” loudly enough to drown out the mounting DOJ news.

At some point over the next year the media will seemingly have to conclude that “Trump 2024” isn’t as ratings-friendly of a narrative as it once was, and that the more ratings-friendly narrative is to start giving proper attention to the details that keep surfacing about the DOJ’s criminal investigation into Trump. But we’re clearly not there yet. So much for the Trump 2024 train. But we’re only going to see louder Trump 2024 hype from the media for awhile.