Molly Jong-Fast: Donald Trump Has Hijacked the News Cycle With Indictment Watch.

[Celerity]

Since announcing his impending “arrest” (which hasn’t happened yet), the former president has resumed his role as the media’s main character—he’s even returning to Fox News—and has Republicans rallying behind him. It’s feeling eerily like 2016.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/donald-trump-indictment-watch-news-cycle-media

https://archive.is/vAhOB



For the past week or so, we’ve been hostage to another strange Trump news cycle, a flashback to the many we lived through in the half dozen years between his escalator ride at Trump Tower to his helicopter exit from the White House. For a while, it looked like Donald Trump was out of our lives and retreating to his own Palm Elba. Now all of a sudden everything is 2016 again and we’re glued to CNN news alerts.

After initial reports of possible charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, the “Trump arrest” news cycle truly kicked into gear early on the morning of March 18 with post on Truth Social: “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” Two hours later, a spokesman said the former president had not written his post with direct knowledge of the timing of any arrest, while adding, “President Trump is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system.”

But it didn’t matter that Trump’s spokesman seemed to walk back Trump’s “truth,” as posts on his Truth Social platform are ironically called, or that “TUESDAY” (March 21) came and went with no indictment from the Manhattan DA’s office. (The grand jury is reportedly meeting again Monday.) None of those things mattered, as Trump, yet again, hijacked the news cycle—this time by announcing his impending arrest. As The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote of this chaotic moment: “The political class’s collective capacity for analyzing and digesting events that have not yet occurred, which still might not occur, and whose details are presumably crucial to understanding how they will play out, was on full display.”

Here we get to the central dilemma of covering Trump. By virtue of the fact he was president, and is currently leading the 2024 Republican pack, much of what Trump says and does is arguably newsworthy. But Trump is at best a bad actor and at worst a complete sociopath, known to “flood the zone with shit” in the immortal words of Steve Bannon. So the idea that we, in the media, should take his word for it when he makes some wild claim seems at best misguided. Though it would be impossible to ignore a pending indictment of a former president, could the breathless, nonstop indictment watch have been avoided? Theoretically, yes? But there is a muscle memory many of us have from covering Trump, a kind of Stockholm syndrome from the constant nonstop flood of news. And it’s easy to fall back into old patterns.

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