The Narrative

 Richardson does her usual nice job of laying out how the broad MAGA-sphere has been adept at changing the subject  by seeding the media with various outrageous stories. The fundamental insight of Bannon and Cheung and the whole Trump media apparatus is that most Americans have the attention span of a fruit fly. Some of them revel in the "content" of the reality TV show that Trump has turned America into. There's always drama!

At some point, this exhausting ability to keep flinging poo at the walls of American governance comes back to haunt them. Trump's approval rating is falling in spite of their ability to "flood the zone" with outrage after outrage. That's the crazy thing. It works in short bursts, but it's fundamentally dysfunctional.

In a related way, we have the media's current feeding frenzy over the latest "autopsy" of Biden's abortive 2024 reelection campaign. As an historical accounting...I mean it might be accurate. I personally saw the physical decline more than the mental decline, though they are linked. I think there is a fair assessment that Biden should not have run at all and the party could have had an open primary. I would wager a governor would have run the strongest campaign against Trump, simply because of the anti-incumbency bias that has existed post-Covid. 

Whatever, hindsight is 20/20. The story - in this particular moment - feels like another distraction. This is not the Trump people flooding the zone with outrages, this is the media falling comfortably into a story that they love to tell: Biden is way too old. Maybe he was, but I would argue that if you care about the mental acuity of an aging president, the most important story is likely to be the current occupant of the Oval Office, whose public statements are gibbering idiocy. 

This all feels like the Covid Lab Leak story. Is that an important story? A little bit, I guess, for China to analyze and make sure it doesn't happen again. Does that really have anything to do with the course of the disease once it spread through the Wuhan market? Not really. But "China Bad" is a nice story and it has "controversy" and...sure, that should be reported on. But that has zero to do with the millions who died.

I have been obsessed with season two of Andor, the Star Wars show that is miles better than anything Star Wars has ever produced. The text of the show is about how revolutions start, and it does a great job analyzing how authoritarian regimes try and squeeze control of a population. There's one arch about propaganda and misinformation that looks like it could be torn from today's copy of the Columbia Journalism Review. The Galactic Empire is more fascist than the Trump Administration, but all the same tools are being used.

Seems like that's a more important story than the age of a former president or Trump's latest beef with Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.