Fast-forwarding to the present, Trump is arguably in a better position politically than he was after his 2016 “week from hell.” He is purportedly behind in the national polls again, but the most accurate 2016 poll again shows a closer race than its counterparts, and recent studies suggest his support could be significantly understated due to the shy Trump voter phenomenon. Moreover, the celebratory response of the Democrats and the media to Trump’s illness will almost certainly increase his support. On CNN, in the midst of a tedious discussion about “mixed signals” from the White House, New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen actually compared Trump’s condition to Stalin’s death:

“There have been a lot of comparisons to the Soviet Union in the last couple of days. I think they are not unwarranted. The particular period I am thinking about is something I have written about a lot, which were the days of Stalin’s deathwatch.… When the foreign correspondents and the domestic correspondents, such as they were, all knew what was going on. Nobody was giving them any information.… Everybody was expecting the final call, right? And the planet filled with rumor.””

For CNN to countenance this grotesque caricature of journalism was not merely despicable — it was stupid. It’s difficult to imagine a better way to transform fence-sitting Independents into Trump supporters than to compare the gravely ill President to one of history’s most notorious mass murderers and draw parallels between White House updates on his health and Kremlin propaganda.