The daily morning quest to prove, “Trump really stepped in it this time. Today, it’s all over,” has reached a point of certifiability. Recordings of Trump saying nothing wrong shouldn’t even make news, let alone headlines. And, just the fact that Helsinki happened—not to mention that it won’t be the last Putin-Trump summit—is good news, not bad. But, the anti-Trump press just doesn’t see this.
The larger should-be piece of news with Helsinki would recall Trump’s campaign statement that the US needed to get Edward Snowden back from Russia. But, Snowden didn’t come up, spare a pre-summit article in the Politico. The most likely reason Snowden has fallen down on Trump’s list of priorities is that Snowden blew the whistle on some sloppiness in the NSA. Trump’s original statement against Snowden came about the same time Trump spoke in agreement with then FBI Director James Comey’s desire to have Apple write a backdoor hack for their iPhones, another topic of technology that quietly disappeared. Whatever was going on in the Obama NSA and FBI has probably been fixed and bringing Snowden back into the limelight would show how sloppy inside baseball had gotten. It’s probably best for everyone to just leave it alone.
If the press really wanted to injure Trump, they would have spun Snowden’s situation as some kind of “failure”, but they didn’t. Instead, they are still stuck in their Russianewsgategate conspiracy kookery. By pushing as far as they did this past week, they are truly making themselves irrelevant. This week crossed a new line of crazy for the press.
The most important development this week was not that the queen appointed Charles her successor nor that the new American president met with Russia’s president for the first time nor that Hillary gave a sit-down talk in a moo-moo, but that the press is going insane in public view and doesn’t care. This could shift the balance in the mass media market. Watch for trending changes around the start of August 2018.