The decision was announced at a White House briefing Monday morning. “In light of this weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr.,” was the quote from Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas.
It’s difficult to read the line “in light of this weekend’s events” and not see an admission on the part of the White House that Secret Service protection was previously being denied to Kennedy, Jr. for political reasons, or out of spite, if those are even two different things in this era. Whatever the original prerogative was for pushing the envelope with that denial, it seems to have been removed by series of paradigm-shattering news events, leading to a flurry of real and symbolic surrenders.
MSNBC likewise made an extraordinary decision Sunday night to pull Morning Joe, with CNN saying the network wanted to “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television.” As with the Secret Service decision, MSNBC was making a major admission, essentially telling audiences its lead morning news show is either not really a news show, or that its format only holds up under something less than maximum scrutiny. I can’t recall a similar act of self-sabotage in media.
Meanwhile, in a move that went mostly unnoticed, Meta announced Friday that it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, with CNN citing company sources saying this was done “to ensure that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, would have equal standing with Democrat President Joe Biden.” The next day, after the attempt on Trump’s life that left firefighter Corey Comperatore dead, Axios ran a story about Democratic reaction. Burying the lede, they quoted a “senior House Democrat” at the bottom, saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”
There’s a longer story to be written about the sudden collapse of many of the core premises of the last eight years of American politics, in particular the notion that Trump is such a unique “existential” threat that the system would not bear treating him like any other politician. In conjunction with Trump’s documents case collapsing and a list of other retreats on the lawfare/prosecution front, we appear headed for a new world, though what that will look like remains very unclear. The two obvious options are retreat from the “at all costs” mindset and a double-down, the double-down being the pattern in the Trump era. Who knows yet, but it’s remarkable to watch.
