The first hint of the media narrative that would turn into “Russiagate” surfaced on October 7, 2016 when the US intelligence community announced that foreign hackers had targeted email servers at the Democratic National Committee. Within an hour, however, another bombshell story had landed. An Access Hollywood outtake had been found in which candidate Trump joked boorishly about how his celebrity allowed him to grope women without consequences. (Trump’s ability to survive this scandal said a great deal more about the ineptitude of the Clinton campaign that it did about the strength of his candidacy.)
Then, after the upset election result, several senior Democrats chose to blame Clinton’s defeat on Russian interference rather than accept the shortcomings of their candidate. That, and the drip feeding of suggestive tidbits by the intelligence community, is why the US media has spent the better part of two and a half years down the rabbit hole of what Trump likes to call “the collusion delusion.”
The submission of the Mueller report has produced another frenzy of hyper-partisan name-calling – with one side claiming complete vindication and exoneration, against the facts, while the other doubles down on its deflated assertions. Jeremy Scahill, one of the few journalists who has consistently dismissed the collusion narrative describes what happened as a “colossal media failure [that] reveals how little things have actually changed with the broader press since the Iraq War lies.” Throughout its coverage of the Trump-Russia story, large sections of the media “started from the position that the intelligence community was being truthful about Trump and Russia. The reporting then sought to further confirm those assertions. It was confirmation bias to the nth degree.”
While obsessing over Russia, much of the media neglected stories that deserved far more attention. The venality of many of Trump’s appointees; the mismanagement of whole sections of the federal government; Trump’s long history of questionable business practices; his violation of campaign finance laws and the emoluments clause; his imaginary national emergency at the border, and so on. What coverage there was, often lapsed into a reality show style breathlessness which Trump, by and large, encouraged. As Scahill has noted, because: “Trump is a cartoonish buffoonish villain [this] contributed to an atmosphere where the attitude was that anything Trump was accused of—no matter how insane it sounded—was totally plausible.”
Regardless of what lies ahead with respect to further disclosures in the report, Trump’s media strategy is clear. By getting out in front of Mueller’s complete findings early, and by claiming them as a “complete exoneration”, Trump is now well placed to dismiss further embarrassments as either fake news or as another witch-hunt by embittered opponents. That storyline may be enough to win reelection in 2020. If that is so, the misjudgments of the Democratic party and the credulous media in hyping a foolish conspiracy theory while so much other evidence of Trump’s misrule was in plain view, will deservedly haunt the party, and the country, for another five years.