There Are Two U.S. Senates—and Only One Knows How to Get What It Wants
It’s been something of a bleak period, watching the press make startling departures from telling the straight story about the Trump administration. TNR contributor Parker Molloy noted that, after Trump responded to the No Kings protest with an AI-generated video depicting him dumping gallons of shit on the protests from a fighter plane, the media was at great pains to sand off the edges of the story. There was a time when even the perception of this kind of antipathy toward ordinary citizens—say, when you label them as “deplorable”?—would invite the fury of the media. (Heck, there was a time when the political media launched a fatwa against Howard Dean for shouting at his own rally.) But this never became much of a scandal—though I will concede that Democrats could have done a better job pushing the issue.
And as we learned this week, pushing the issue can work wonders. Steve Bannon, as is his wont, seeded the media pasture with his announcement that there is a “plan” in place to run Trump for a third term. From there, an entire news cycle blossomed, one in which reporters peppered Trump with questions about his plan to run again, all of which he sidestepped—and so those same reporters told their readers that he is not ruling it out. Perhaps my favorite piece from this “Will Trump do a new crime?” boomlet was a Time magazine piece titled “Why Trump Keeps Talking About a Third Term” that suggested, “Whether Trump actually plans to run again for President, in defiance of the Constitution, merely bringing up the possibility so much, some observers say, may be strategic in its own right.”
The one problem with that contention is that Trump wasn’t bringing it up—a bunch of reporters were, and in so doing turned what should have been a confrontation (“Why do your allies keep saying you plan to abrogate the Constitution?”) into a jocular spitball session where they help Trump go over his options. (We are reliably informed that the president finds the maneuver where he runs as vice president “too cute.”) Trump, for once, seemed to understand what game was afoot. “Am I not ruling it out?” he responded to one inquiry, “I mean, you’ll have to tell me.” And so they did, in the pages of their publications.
