Once able to dictate the news cycle, Trump is now being buried by it.
Twelve days ago, The New York Times published a story based on documents that reporters had wanted to see for years: Donald Trump’s tax returns. The story revealed that the president was deeply in debt, that he rarely pays much tax at all, and that he is obligated to pay back $400 million to lenders in the next four years. In any normal political environment, it would be the biggest story of the election, possibly even of an entire presidency. It has, instead, passed almost entirely from view.
One could argue there’s good reason for that. Since the Times published that story—again: 12 days ago—Trump gave the most unhinged debate performance in American history. Then he and more than two dozenadministration and GOP officials contracted Covid-19. Trump spent three days in Walter Reed Medical Center; his doctors have lied about his healthand refused to provide basic information about his condition, including whether he has pneumonia. Since returning to the White House, the president has been behaving like a mix of Howard Hughes and Jack Torrance, unleashing a horde of all-caps tweets and sending mixed messages about crucial policy decisions, such as whether there will be a second stimulus before next month’s election.
There is, as the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop has arguedextensively, simply too much news. The sheer number of insane, world-turning-on-its-axis stories circulating at once is impossible to hold together. “Events—some of them once-in-decades or once-in-a-century occurrences—now play out all in unison,” The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, sounding uncharacteristically like Don DeLillo, wrote over the weekend. “There is no respite. If one ebbs another flows.”
Journalists are, for the second election cycle in a row, riding the hurricane. In 2016, this arguably played in Trump’s favor. He could, with the help of a few fortuitous bits of breaking news, keep the focus on one story—Hillary Clinton’s emails and alleged corruption—while there were so many Trump scandals circulating at once that no single story could fell him.
This time is different: The scandals, it seems, are catching up—thanks to small improvements in media coverage and an overwhelming sense of exhaustion with the endless news cycle.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159655/donald-trump-lost-ability-short-circuit-news