#News media zombies will have nothing to feed on after Trump

A nickel’s worth of free advice for soon-to-be-private citizen Donald J. Trump: You can destroy your enemies, you know. In six months CNN’s Jeff Zucker could be wearing a barrel and playing harmonica on street corners begging for spare change. MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post — you can zonk them like Thor wielding the mighty Hammer of Mjölnir. All you have to do is stop talking. 

Since approximately June 16 of 2015, all of these news outlets’ business models have been built around the same strategy: Turning your words into their profits. The Times tripled — tripled! — its online subscriber rolls in what’s supposed to be a dying era for newspapering. You may or may not have noticed this, but no matter what the real news may be, the media lose interest in a day or two and turn back to whatever words are emanating from the White House: “OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE TRUMP JUST SAID HAITI, A NOTED CARIBBEAN PARADISE, IS A CRAPHOLE???” 

Substance-wise, there was almost zilch. Some goofball staff dweeb at the Department of Homeland Security wrote an anonymous op-ed that led to an anonymous book deal and once we all found out who he was, he joined the Anonymous Hall of Fame. The media expended more commentary on this yutz than they did on the many US stock market records and I can’t even remember his name. Can you? (I just looked it up: He was called Miles Taylor.) 

Trump never did do anything truly wild, never even gave us a Cabinet appointment like Vince McMahon for Secretary of Steroids. All he did was say stuff. Stuff Trump said about John McCain alone provided headlines for about three days on three or four separate occasions. The entire nation spent a week talking about what Trump said about Megyn Kelly. Even stuff he didn’t say, like “Everybody should inject Clorox,” provided several days of crisis porn. 

And if Trump, as a private citizen, should stop providing the media with 24/7 OMG moments, what then? There is no plan B. Covering Biden scandals won’t happen, unless you mean covering them up. Yet the media can hardly portray Biden the way they did Barack Obama, as a bold, visionary, inspiring, energetic pathbreaker. Biden can’t get through a sentence without a TelePrompTer and sometimes not even then. On the off chance Biden makes it to 2024 without lapsing into a vegetative state, in which case praise of Kamala Harris’ godlike virtues will turn every media outlet into the equivalent of the Pyongyang Kim-Tribune, the media can’t report anything that makes Biden look bad, which means they can’t report anything Biden does. Judging by the full-bore freakout over a mildly snarky column in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Jill Biden should not be addressed as “Doctor” because she isn’t a physician, the media now considers any criticism of anyone related to the incoming president off-limits. 

Once Trump leaves the White House, the media’s only hope is this: Attract viewers by pretending he is still the most important man on earth. Team coverage of every tweet. Special bulletins every time he appears on Newsmax. Still, at the back of Anderson Cooper’s mind will be this thought: The last time we did this, he became president. He could run for president again. If Trump does so he could wind up running against Harris, who was such a disaster in the Democratic primaries that she was at less than 4 percent in the polls when she finally dropped out, and is even less popular among people who aren’t Democrats. Do CNN and MSNBC really want to gamble that Harris is more popular than Hillary Clinton? 

Until then, there are mortgage payments to be made. Up next: Rachel Maddow’s special in-depth report about how the Russians are secretly behind Trump shooting below par at Mar-a-Lago today. 

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review