O Narrative! O Narrative!

Here’s what I said about that day right after court, at 5:04 pm EDT on May 16, 2024. I’m not patting myself on the back for being right; I’m just expressing mystification about how many others could have been so wrong. pic.twitter.com/Xtg4Ai0sh6

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 1, 2024

These erroneous perceptions undoubtedly filtered their way into the minds of the people in the gallery of the courtroom, because the journalists there all had access to texts, emails, and tweets about what was being said on TV

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 1, 2024

For convenience, here’s a transcript of what I said on May 16. By the time I said this the misleading media narrative had already taken hold. pic.twitter.com/RZZvnKlXGw

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 1, 2024

* may have been the result of the herd instinct

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 1, 2024

All the way around the world (my fault) to make the point that it’s all about the narrative,”objective reality” be damned.

Part of the journalistic problem here is the overwhelming anxiety about the future and what that to say about it. Andrea Mitchell spent an hour (or two) bewailing the fact that a felony conviction of a former President put us in “uncharted waters.” Shit, I grew up jn the Age of Anxiety, under the Damoclean sword of imminent nuclear war. As I got older the warnings got louder that humankind had never built weapons they didn’t ultimately use. Compared to that this isn’t even a mild concern, much less a dreadful passage that must be discussed on cable TeeVee with every Tom, Dick and Harry to tell us what the future is. Chayefsky’s “Network” put Sybil the soothsayer on the news program with Howard Beale and, with lo and behold, news must now reassure us that the future is safe, even if “uncharted.”

Good grief.

The simple fact is, the future is not news: it hasn’t happened yet. Who will win the election? Tell you in November. What happens now? Well, there’s a hearing on July 11. What happened in the trial? Despite the best efforts at predictions by commentators (the accepted term is “analysis,” but do that instead of predictions and see how quickly you’re called back), nobody predicted this outcome. Well, nobody but Michael Cohen, but who listens to him? Of course, “what happened in the trial?” is a question about the past. Journalists don’t deal with those. In Objective Land, every day dawns in a new world. Donald Trump’s gibbering is edited into sound bites that don’t sound incoherent and insane for the evening news because we must not frighten the children. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Like what really happened in Trump’s jury trial, and why the verdict actually makes perfect sense.

And I don’t think it’s the herd instinct. I think it’s the 

 Narrative. Ignore the Narrative at your peril. Serve the Narrative, and it will serve you. Even if it has bugger all to do with reality.  I mean, all the energy being spent on who thought what was said where, and it matters not a bean now. Serving the Narrative is serving nothing. It is serving a stone or a block of wood. All the commentary and hand-wringing and whinging and threatening is as effective as jawboning a hurricane. People can whinge and shout all they want: the law in its majesty doesn’t care. OJ did not die in prison, even though most of the country thought he was guilty. Trump will not be acquitted before November because Steve Bannon and a sad handful of VP hopefuls demand it. I think Conway’s analysis was right, but he didn’t alter the trajectory of the case, and neither did the narrative clung to by all the pundits watching/reporting on the trial.

The Narrative really doesn’t matter. And a lot of the time, it isn’t even that entertaining.