You don’t have to endorse Trump’s attacks on the integrity of Robert Mueller, his mockery of his former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or his distorted view of the Justice Department to find the dynamic here unsettling. Trump was basically told that he’d be investigated and smeared for years over Russia collusion that didn’t happen, and if he objected and wanted to make it stop, they’d investigate him for that, too.
The ultimate weapon he had was, funnily enough, the truth. As he said again and again, there was no Russia collusion. Every time he repeated the phrase, the press rolled its eyes and opined about how it showed an untoward defensiveness. Then it dug into another news cycle devoted to Trump’s impending doom.
A news industry that should have a healthy skepticism could never apply any skepticism to its own narrative and assumptions. And so, on the question of Russia collusion that put a cloud over the White House and dominated the past two years of our public life, Donald Trump was a more reliable narrator than the media that so self-righteously scorns him.
