It’s now more clear than ever that Donald Trump is going to prison in New York – so why is the media still pretending otherwise?
In a disappointing but not unexpected development, the media is giving the bare minimum amount of coverage to the bombshell news that the Manhattan District Attorney has empaneled a new grand jury for the fairly obvious purpose of criminally indicting Donald Trump. A few MSNBC hosts have touched on it. A few prominent Twitter pundits accurately emphasized the importance of it. But for the most part, this storyline – arguably the most important in politics in 2021 – is still getting buried.
There’s a reason for this, and it’s not difficult to parse. The media is giving almost no attention to Trump’s criminal prosecution in New York for the same reason the media spends every day going on and on about the (supposed) lack of a federal criminal probe against Trump. The reason is the media is still trying to scare people into staying tuned in by hyping the Trump magic comeback 2024″ narrative.
If the media at large were to admit that Trump is highly likely to be indicted and arrested in New York in the coming months on the kind of straightforward financial charges that essentially always result in conviction and prison, it would blow a major hole in their current “Trump 2024” narrative. So they just ignore it. The kicker is that if Trump were being actively prosecuted by the Feds but not in New York, the media would all but ignore the federal case and instead spend all its time insisting that Trump is going to get away with it all due to a lack of New York prosecution.
Even the Washington Post – which broke the news that the new grand jury has been empaneled – went out of its way to downplay its own reporting, to the point of being misleading. The Post merely framed it as being a criminal probe into the “Trump Organization” when it’s very clear that Donald Trump himself is the criminal target. The Post is also suggesting that the grand jury “might” bring indictments, as if it were some kind of 50-50 crapshoot. But the factual reality is that when prosecutors ask for an indictment, grand juries grant that request greater than 99% of the time.
This narrative will eventually shift. The problem for now is that the media wouldn’t be able to get people staying tuned in every day by simply admitting that Trump is on a path to prison, because the legal process is slow moving and there’s still only occasional news coming out of the New York criminal case. So instead the media settles for getting ratings by insisting that Trump is still about to jump out at you from behind every dark corner.
Once Donald Trump is actually arrested in New York, this should all change. If nothing else, the specter of Trump in handcuffs will force the media to push the New York criminal case against him front and center. Of course we’ll see some media pundits start to insist that Trump will be magically acquitted (even though that essentially never happens on these kinds of charges, no matter who you are), or that he’ll be magically pardoned (even though the next Governor of New York is overwhelmingly likely to be a Democrat). But taking highly unlikely doomsday scenarios, and painting them as certain to happen, is just what the worst of media pundits instinctively do.
At least Trump’s arrest will force the media to acknowledge that Trump’s fate consists of criminal trials and legal defenses, which will poke a big hole in the media’s current narrative that Trump is somehow magically going to glide into the White House in 2024. The average viewer can figure out that it’s absurd to frame a guy who’s going on criminal trial in 2022 as somehow being the frontrunner for 2024.
But for now, the media is (with some notable exceptions) still largely pretending that the New York criminal case against Donald Trump doesn’t exist. The fact that Trump is on a clear path to prison is being so widely ignored by the media, it sounds almost foreign to even the most anti-Trump of people whenever Palmer Report dares to say it out loud. But the facts are what they are, and when the media portrays Trump’s New York arrest as some shocking development that no one could have seen coming, Palmer Report readers will have known exactly what was coming.
