Moving the goalposts (again) on Donald Trump’s indictment
Based solely on what the major news outlets themselves have reported, we’ve known since April that the DOJ was criminally investigating Donald Trump for stealing classified documents, and we’ve known since May that the probe had reached the grand jury stage. At that point there was every reason to expect that the DOJ would end up searching Trump’s home. Yet the day that search inevitably happened, the media presented it as if it were a shocking development that no one could have seen coming.
For that matter, it’s been clear since May that the DOJ was very likely going to end up criminally indicting Trump. The DOJ wouldn’t have empaneled a grand jury in a criminal investigation into a former President of the United States unless it knew it was going to end up with enough evidence to get an indictment and a conviction.
Yet even as the DOJ has continued to plow forward with the various and numerous court proceedings that have inevitably taken place between the search of Trump’s home and the eventual indictment, we keep hearing major media outlets and pundits present Trump’s potential indictment as if it were some 50-50 proposition at best. After all, the media has to keep up the suspense in order to drive ratings – and the best way to do that is to vastly overstate the odds that Trump could “get away with it all.”
Now that we’re nearly past the midterms and we’re entering the window where the DOJ is increasingly likely to go ahead and indict Trump, we’re seeing the media move the goalposts yet again. We’re now supposed to ignore the media’s prior false claims that the DOJ wasn’t even investigating Trump, and the media’s prior suggestions that the DOJ would end up not indicting Trump. Instead we’re supposed to swallow the media’s new narrative, in which it acknowledges that Trump is very likely about to be indicted, but suggests that it’ll somehow magically help him.
We’re already seeing this media narrative surfacing in places such as this ridiculous article, which reveals that various Republican operatives now expect Trump to be indicted soon, but that Trump’s indictment “could actually end up helping” him politically. It’s one thing for a Republican spin artist to say something this laugh out loud ludicrous; it’s a whole other thing for the media to print such silly spin as if it were in any way credible.
Again, the media told us Trump would “get away with it all” because he supposedly wasn’t under DOJ investigation. Then the media told us Trump would “get away with it all” because the DOJ wouldn’t dare indict him. Now the media is telling us Trump will “get away with it all” because he’ll benefit from being criminally indicted. By the Feds. For espionage.
This kind of fear mongering nonsense only sounds intuitively true to you if you’ve allowed the media to spend every day of the past two years convincing you that Donald Trump has unlimited magical powers, that anything bad that happens to him is somehow actually good for him, and that anything that weakens him instead makes him stronger. But back in the real world, Trump is not some Jedi. If the DOJ strikes him down, he does not magically become stronger.
If you really want to game this out, once the DOJ indicts and arrests Trump on espionage charges, he’ll end up out on bail at best, or under house arrest or pretrial incarceration at worst. Even if he makes bail – which is far from a given in an espionage case where the defendant has known ties with international criminals – Trump would still be limited in his ability to travel among other constraints. If he’s under house arrest while awaiting trial, he wouldn’t be able to campaign in person at all. It’s laughable – and that’s before getting to the part where he’s convicted and put in prison well before the 2024 election.
Most pundits out there want you to believe the DOJ leadership is a bunch of hapless morons, so they can portray themselves as being smarter and savvier than the DOJ. But in reality the DOJ knows how to read a calendar. It knows it has to leave enough time to put Trump on trial, convict him, and put him in prison before the height of the 2024 presidential election. Keep in mind, that election is still two full years away. The DOJ does actually know what it’s doing.
For that matter, Trump’s favorability numbers have been weak across the board since January 6th. And since it’s become clear over the past couple months that Trump is going to be indicted on serious criminal charges, his favorability with independent voters has fallen off even further. It’s fairly obvious that once he’s criminally indicted for espionage, his numbers will get worse, not better. He wasn’t viable for 2024 before. He’s certainly not going to become viable by getting criminally indicted. That should be obvious to everyone who hasn’t spent the past two years being brainwashed by the media into believing that Trump has unlimited omnipotent powers. As Han Solo once said, that’s not how the force works.
