A Tale of Two Trump Stories
Two major pieces of journalism about Donald Trump hit the pixels today. One concerns the possibility he committed treason. The other is about a Playboy model who says she had an affair with him a decade ago. Guess which one has generated more attention.
OK, so it helps that the New Yorker’s story has the pretty face of Karen McDougal as clickbait (to be fair, the magazine itself didn’t use her that way, but every other site writing about the story sure has). The real point of the piece isn’t that Trump cheated on Melania, because of course he did. It’s about how Trump’s enablers buried McDougal’s story — the National Enquirer paid her six figures for it, then spiked it, supposedly because it “wasn’t believable.” This is an obvious lie, since even the National Enquirer isn’t in the business of paying out the money regardless of whether the story it paid for is true. If it really didn’t believe it, the rag would demand the money back.
The treason story is from The Intercept, which has hired Pulitzer-winning reporter James Risen. His detailed recap of the evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia doesn’t reveal anything new, but it does take the rest of the media to task for intentionally pretending that what Trump is accused of amounts to treason.
Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s about something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid to use serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the Trump-Russia narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental stories in which the gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They seem to think that treason is too much of a conversation-stopper, that it interrupts the flow of cable television and Twitter. God forbid you might upset the right wing! (And the left wing, for that matter.)
This is the first of a four-part series Risen is working on. We’ll see if the subsequent articles can gain more traction.
