The giveaway that Donald Trump is set to get hit with utterly terrible news this week
Back in the day, the Sunday morning political talk shows were among the most serious things on television – and of course the least watched. These days the Sunday morning shows are a ratings-driven crap fest of contrarian hot takes and interviews without followup questions. Chuck Todd may be retiring, but not without first ruining an entire day of the week for us, as the other networks have spent the past decade feeling compelled to follow him down the ratings rabbit hole each Sunday.
These days the only useful aspect of the Sunday morning shows is that they usually subtly give away where the media thinks the story is going to be headed that week. If the media thinks things are heading in one direction, they’ll use their Sunday morning shows to dishonestly steer things in the precise opposite direction. That way they get ratings on Sunday out of saying “Look over here” and then they get even more ratings as the week’s developments unfold and they can portray those developments as some dramatic surprise.
To that end, whenever the calendar makes clear that Donald Trump is about to have a very bad week, the Sunday morning shows make a point of portraying him as being more invincibly powerful than ever. This pattern has proven consistent enough over the past couple years that you could place a wager on it and make a mint. So it made me perk up today when multiple Sunday shows went as cartoonishly far out of their way as possible to portray Trump as being more magically powerful than ever.
They dusted off all their usual tropes. They quoted one poll out of context in order to claim that Trump is going to win no matter what, while ignoring all the other new polls that show his numbers falling. They even did the “sounding the alarm” thing. This was a four star effort at selling us on the idea that Trump has taken over and all hope is lost, and we’d better sit there and stare at our screens in the name of vigilance.
It got me wondering just what the media is expecting to happen this upcoming week that’s going to be so devastating for Donald Trump. This is always the pattern. When they spend Sunday portraying Trump as more magically powerful than ever, it’s because they’re expecting news to surface by the middle of the week that’s awful for Trump, so they can go with “In a shocking twist, the asteroid didn’t hit us!”
But I can’t quite put my finger on what the media thinks is going to happen this week that’s going to be so bad for Trump. There are no known indictments or criminal charges coming. We’re not about to see another devastating trial date announced. Trump and his pals are going to lose even more rulings this week in the various criminal cases against him, but everyone expects that at this point. There isn’t one big singular bombshell that’s in danger of landing on Trump’s head this week. So what were these Sunday morning garbage shows trying to counter program against today?
Perhaps we’re simply at a point where we go into each week expecting so much bad news for Donald Trump, the media is simply using this Sunday to generically spin the narrative in a positive direction for Trump, under the presumption that something terrible will happen for him this week and allow for that dramatic whiplash reversal.
Remember, the media never pays a price for always intentionally being wrong about these things. The artificially manufactured dramatic twists and turns are enough to keep the audience so off balance that they never do figure out that nearly all of the political media’s predictions end up being wildly wrong. So this constant contrarian hyperbole is to be expected. But it was so cartoonishly over the top this morning – even for the rotting landfill that Sunday morning shows have become – it sure makes you wonder why the media thinks this upcoming week is going to be so devastating for Trump.
