Wednesday, June 26, 2024

If Donald Trump Has Superpowers…

The thing I suspect, if you're sort of reading the tea leaves this week, it sounds like they are suggesting the vice president pick may come this week, and, if so, that is one more way they are hedging against a bad debate loss," Scarborough said. "What you do if you get really bad headlines coming out of the debate on Friday morning, you make sure that throughout the weekend they are not talking about the debate. Instead, they are talking about your vice presidential pick. Even the leaking of that is a possibility shows they are scared. I mean, they are really scared Donald Trump is going to blow this thing." 
"That might be a contingency plan," [Matt] Lewis said. "If the debate goes well, we hold the announcement. If it goes poorly, we bracket it with the vice presidential announcement. I have to say Donald Trump, he is really good at controlling the message, there no doubt about it, and changing the subject. It used to be something like a debate would be talked about for weeks on end and it would dominant multiple news cycles. That may not be the case. Maybe he says or does something either important or just crazy, and that is what we are talking about a couple of days from now. He is really good at that. Bad in a lot of other things but good at driving the agenda and our attention."
...why does he keep losing?

He surprised everyone by defeating Hillary Clinton, who was a great policy wonk in a long line of Democratic policy wonks who were lousy politicians, and Trump still only won in the electoral college.

And he’s lost everything since, including the Congress and 60+ lawsuits in 2020, along with every court trial he’s been involved in, in 2024. Trump changes the narrative? His testimony in the three civil trials destroyed him, his refusal to testify in his criminal case didn’t save him (it wouldn’t have helped him, either). The narrative in all four cases chewed him up and spit him out.

What Lewis is talking about is changing the attention of the press, which is always distracted by the next shiny bauble; or just a butterfly. 🦋 But Lewis’ assumption is that the press narrative matters; which is the same reasoning that thinks Twitter matters:
The MSM is slavishly devoted to the next crazy thing Trump does (unless he says it at a rally, and then it’s a dog bites man story). To be fair, political Twitter is no better. But neither political news nor political Twitter (nor political polls, for that matter), are real life. Just because the press is chasing the next shiny bauble doesn’t mean the electorate is following. Despite Trump hammering on Biden’s age (with a lot of media help), Biden is rising in the polls. Despite Trump screaming about the economy (with media help), the economy is more favorably regarded as time passes. What really tanked Trump’s polls? A felony conviction, for which he will at least get probation before the GOP convention. And depending on what the Supremes finally do, Trump could go to trial in October in D.C.

The political narrative is whatever Trump said last because all Trump does is talk, and because there’s a conservative bias in American media (prove me wrong). But the political narrative is not real life. If Americans are not “paying attention to politics,” what makes you think they’re paying attention to political pundits and reporters? The political narrative is always and only about the horse race, and Trump isn’t really in the horse race. He’s campaigning less to win office than to pay his lawyers. He walks back his idiot policy proposals, promises to cut off federal funds from every school in the land (because all 50 states have public health laws about vaccines), and the rest of his campaigning is sharks, electric boats, and washing his hair.

And frankly, if the press would cover those statements (there’s video! You don’t need three corroborating sources!) objectively (“Just report what he said!”), it would go a long way to balancing the political narrative.

It might also kill the narrative that Trump controls the narrative. That control is actually in the hands of editors who decide what to report, and what not to report.
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