Why This Time Is Different

A significant number of Democrats, about 35% of them, are reacting to the Ukraine scandal/Trump impeachment with the resignation of the oft-defeated, convinced Trump’s wall of GOP/Fox reality-denial will turn aside the latest news of his crimes as it has all the others. I don’t think so, and for a very simple reason: The media is treating it differently.

The reason Trump has triumphed and persisted until now is his ability to play the media like a lion-tamer. When he occasionally has lost control of the narrative, he has regained it by distracting the media a new batch of shiny objects in the form of tweets. The media has been happy to play this game. Every new word-outrage acts as another piece of clickbait, generated with little to no effort, as opposed to actually putting reporters on the ground, where the real outrages are taking place.

This new story, though, doesn’t require boots on the ground, just eyes on documents and ears on telephones, and as each new revelation opens new avenues of investigation, it’s not likely to stall for weeks on end, as Robert Mueller’s probe did. Perhaps unexpectedly, it also prompted members of the media to evolve spines. Pretty soon they might be ready to walk on land.

Every day now I see headlines about shouting matches between CNN journos and Trump apologists who try to derail their interviews. I wasn’t seeing much of that before. I see more stories about GOP fear and dislike of Trump, which means more of them are talking, off the record for now, to the press. If you think this makes no difference, don’t kid yourself. The “shocking” increase in support for impeachment — it’s up 10% or among Democrats and independents, about 7% among Republicans — is no shock at all given the change in tone from the media.

Every new revelation will make Trump’s hole deeper — and he’s going to keep digging.