You’ve got to be kidding

| 7:00 pm EST November 21, 2019
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The House impeachment inquiry has concluded its televised hearings, for now. No one is expecting the House to hand impeachment off to the Senate before the end of the year, meaning that we have absolutely no idea what the political landscape will look like by the time the trial begins. There’s not a pundit out there who has any clue what to expect by then.

Unfortunately, the public expects pundits to be able to foresee the future, and so a lot of pundits feel pressure to say something authoritative. Even worse, the TV pundits know that – for the most part – conservatives react to being told they’re going to win, and liberals react to being told they’re going to lose. So when all else fails, the easiest way to keep people tuned in is to paint Trump as winning.

These House impeachment hearings went awfully for Donald Trump, his co-conspirators, his underlings, and his allies. There are ways in which it could have gone even worse for Trump, but realistically, it couldn’t have gone much worse. There’s zero good news for Trump coming out of these hearings. The evidence shows he’s as guilty as can be, poll numbers continue to make clear that most Americans want him gone, and even some of Trump’s own people are now selling him out because they can tell which way the wind is blowing.

Because things are now going so overwhelmingly poorly for Donald Trump, it’s an easy cheat for a pundit to simply announce that, no, they’re magically going great for him. Senate Republicans are going to automatically acquit him without any cost to themselves, the public will take that acquittal as a sign that Trump is innocent and smells like roses, and Trump will magically be reelected. That’s comically braindead gibberish, but it sure would be scary if it were true, so it’s scary enough to keep you glued to your television.

Now that Trump is at his absolute lowest and most vulnerable, most (not all) pundits are going to work overtime to convince us that he’s somehow magically in the driver’s seat. They have to. Trump’s odds of winning reelection are perhaps five percent, and while that’s five points too high, it’s not enough to keep people glued to their televisions. They have to make it scarier than that. Now that House impeachment hearings have left Trump gasping for air, we’re going to hear a lot of hot air about how this was all for nothing because the Republicans have a magic wand. They don’t. That’s kindergarten level thinking. These next few days are probably a good time to tune out the TV pundits, with a few exceptions, altogether.