We’re finally at the part we’ve been waiting for
Thursday’s public release of the most generic sections of the Fulton County special grand jury report merely served to help confirm what we already knew, and what District Attorney Fani Willis already told us: criminal indictments are coming. Even as that was playing out yesterday, Michael Cohen was on television, making clear just how far along the Manhattan District Attorney is in that criminal case against Donald Trump. Meanwhile in the background, we got the news that DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith is so far along in the process of indicting Trump, he’s already gotten three of Trump’s own attorneys to testify against him to the grand jury.
Yet through all of this, we still keep hearing this narrative – over and over – that nothing is happening and nothing is going to happen. If anything, as the news over the past week has made it crystal clear that Trump is being indicted in three jurisdictions, the media spin has somehow gotten even more pessimistic and negative. It’s almost proactive dishonesty at this point. Good news surfaces in one of the three criminal cases, and the media tries to counter it by launching into histrionic pessimism about one of the other three criminal cases. The better the news, the worse the spin.
I did warn you that this would happen. The problem now is that everyone can see that Donald Trump is going to be indicted in multiple jurisdictions. When is that going to happen? No one knows. Not you, not me, not anyone in the media. The first indictment against Trump could drop tomorrow. It could take a month. But if the media just admits that Trump is obviously going to be indicted and that it has no idea when it’s going to happen, large chunks of the audience will simply tune out until whenever the indictments do start dropping – and the media can’t have that.
In a lot of football games, there’s a point late in the game where one team is ahead by more points than the other team is physically capable of scoring before the clock runs out, and that the team in the lead has already won the game. Every knowledgeable fan knows when that point in the game has arrived. But the announcers will nearly always continue to pretend that the outcome is still up in the air for far longer than it is, because their job is to keep people tuned in for as long as possible. Knowledgable fans know the outcome is over, but less knowledgeable fans don’t, and the announcers are pandering to the latter group.
This feels a lot like that. To those who have been following the specifics of what’s going on in these three jurisdictions, and are familiar with what it all means, it’s just so plainly obvious that prosecutors have made the decision to indict, and are working through the end stages of the indictment process. But the media knows that if it admits as much, audiences may not see a point in watching the clock tick down until the end. And so the media has to create this notion that these criminal cases are in great peril of falling apart at any moment, to keep you glued to the screen each day in suspense from now until the day the indictments begin.
That’s part of why it’s so important for all of you to become as knowledgeable as possible about how these various political and legal processes work. If your football team is ahead by 28 points and has the ball on first down with two minutes left in the game, and the other team is out of timeouts, you know that the game is already 100% over. You’re not vulnerable to letting the announcers suck you into staring nervously at those final minutes by falsely convincing you that your team is somehow in mortal danger of losing the game.
It’s just so obvious by now that Donald Trump is about to be criminally indicted in multiple jurisdictions. That’s a huge deal, and it’ll come with a lot of fallout, and we should be focused on that instead of letting the media bait us into believing that the prosecutors bringing these indictments are doing “nothing” and it’s all going to hell.
Let’s put it another way. Even if anything has gone wrong with any of the three criminal cases being brought against Donald Trump, nothing has surfaced that would give any such indication. So all the pessimistic media doom and gloom about these criminal cases is based on literally nothing. If anything does go wrong in any of these cases, it’ll have zero correlation to anything that the media is currently talking about. So why even listen to that crap?
I said all along that the closer we got to Trump being indicted, and the more obvious it became that it was about to happen, the more ridiculous the spin would get. Sure enough, here we are. But here’s the thing. If you’ve spent all this time believing (as I do) that it’s crucial that Trump be indicted, then you should be very pleased right now, because you’re finally getting your way. This is what we’ve been waiting for, demanding, hoping for. And now we’re upon it. This is a good news situation. Let’s treat it like one.
