“Other than that, Mr. Trump, how was the campaign?”
By his own public admission, Donald Trump is on the verge of being criminally indicted for the third and fourth time over the next few weeks. This is a guy who’s going to stand criminal trial at least four times over the next year, on a hundred or more combined felony counts, in multiple jurisdictions, with multiple trial judges.
All Trump has to do is be convicted on any one of those felony counts by any one of those juries in any one of those trials, and he’s going to prison. When physically frail seventy-seven year olds go to prison for any length of time, that’s usually pretty much the end of them. The odds of Trump having any future at all are now incalculably small.
Yet the more obvious it becomes that Donald Trump’s life as he knows it is very likely over, all the major media outlets can seem to do is ask if these criminal indictments might somehow in some small way negatively impact his “2024 campaign.”
The media’s coverage is approaching the point of straight up gaslighting. Donald Trump’s criminal indictments, criminal trials, and presumptive prison sentences are being treated as if they’re some mere mosquito bite that might simply annoy Trump during his campaign, or hamper him in some tiny way. ARE YOU KIDDING?
The idea that Donald Trump’s four upcoming criminal trials are somehow being framed in terms of his 2024 campaign, is nothing short of insane. There is no Trump 2024 campaign. He hasn’t even hired a campaign manager, has he? Why bother? It’s not a real campaign. Even his own fans know it, as evidenced by the fact that Trump raised half as much money in the most recent quarter as Joe Biden. Even Trump’s fans no longer want to bother giving money to a guy they know is merely on his way to prison.
In a Reuters poll conducted on this day in 2015, you know who was in first place in the 2016 Republican primary race? Jeb Bush. The notion that someone is an actual frontrunner, just because they’re in first place in primary polling this far in advance, is absurd. How’d that work out for Jeb?
But it’s different, the media will tell us, because it’s Trump. Everything is different when it’s Trump. No one seems to be able to explain why this is, or give any concrete examples of it. They just tell us, over and over again, that it’s different because it’s Trump. His base will save him no matter what! Yeah, that’s it! Except they’re already giving up on him to the point that his campaign donations are in the toilet. And if his base is supposed to be so dominant within Republican Party politics, how is it that roughly half of 2024 Republican primary voters are picking anyone but Trump in poll after poll?
But hey, none of that matters, because Donald Trump has magical powers or something. That’s what the entire mainstream media, on both sides, keeps implying. The same magical powers that are supposedly going to hand him the Republican nomination “no matter what” are apparently the same magical powers that’ll somehow allow him to magically get acquitted on a hundred or more felony charges by four different trial juries, or somehow magically still go free even if he’s convicted.
It’s sheer utter nonsense. It’s a joke. The more thoroughly and obviously finished Donald Trump is, the more hyperbolically the mainstream media tries to claim that he’s somehow more powerful than ever. The only difference is that the major news outlets on the right tell us it’s great that he’s magically invincible, and the major news outlets on the left tell us we’re doomed because he’s magically invincible. It’s all nothing but ratings-driven fiction.
I mean hey, if the Republican Party really wants to nominate a guy who will be in prison before the general election cycle even begins, then by all means, bring it on. The media will once again try to tell us that Trump can somehow magically get elected President while in prison, because again, he has magical powers. But back in the real world, if the Republicans nominate a guy who will be in prison, they will lose in historically massive fashion – for practical reasons that should be so painfully obvious, they’re probably not even worth taking the time to spell out.
There’s a joke with the punchline “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” It’s based on the absurdity of the idea that her husband’s death during the play might have merely been some small detraction from her overall ability to enjoy the play. That’s kind of how it feels when the media asks about Trump’s overall viability in the 2024 election while downplaying the fact that he has four criminal trials between now and then. It’s growing more absurd by the day. And you have to wonder how much longer the media will even try to keep pretending that there’s going to be a “Trump 2024” campaign. It may make for a short term ratings grab, but it’s starting to make the media look like complete idiots.
