Why The Buzzfeed Report Won’t Sink Trump
If you were paying attention to the news yesterday, you most likely saw an article somewhere that mentioned a report by Buzzfeed claiming that Trump had directed Cohen to lie to Congress about how long Trump’s negotiations with Russia lasted.
This was touted as the smoking gun in the Russia investigation by political pundits; after all, if it’s true, it is stone cold evidence that Trump committed a felony, but here we are, two days later, and nothing’s happened. The discussion of the report in the media and online has already died down, and there has been no action on the legal side, in Congress or otherwise, resulting from this report.
Why is this case?
Well, for starters, the report was released by Buzzfeed. According to a MarketWatch survey, Buzzfeed is the second least trusted news outlet in the US, so everyone was already set to be skeptical.
On top of that, the claims were entirely uncorroborated. Buzzfeed said they were given the story by anonymous sources close to the investigation, and no other respectable news outlet was able to back it up. On top of that, there’s no claim directly from Cohen saying that he was told to lie to Congress by Trump, and Mueller’s office actually released a statement saying that the claims made by the Buzzfeed article were not accurate.
So, this story wasn’t trusted to begin with, and it was false anyway, or at least misleading. But that’s not the only reason it didn’t go anywhere.
After all, it’s not like this is the first time there’s been a bombshell report on Trump. A little over a month ago, Cohen claimed that he was directed by “Individual 1”, which was very obviously Trump, to make hush money payments to women he’d had affairs with.
Cohen had already been convicted of charges relating to these payments, and if it was true that Trump had directed him to do that, it would make him a co-conspirator to commit a felony.
Unlike the Buzzfeed report, this claim actually had teeth. There were court filings and Cohen’s testimony on the matter that supported it, and honestly, it should have resulted in Trump’s impeachment, but it didn’t.
A few Democrats in Congress did call for his impeachment, along with opinion writers and people on social media, but nothing actually happened. No impeachment charge was brought, and less than a week later, the entire thing had practically been forgotten.
Since these accusations had a lot more evidence supporting them than the Buzzfeed report, we can’t say that this failed to result in action due to doubt or lack of evidence. There was something else in play.
There’s this concept known as “ad nauseam”, which is the idea that, if something is repeated enough times, it loses its significance and becomes boring and tiresome. While the term is typically used to discuss intentional use in propaganda, it can also be applied to unintentional uses, like with the Russia investigation.
Think about it, how often has the Russia investigation been mentioned in the news? How many times have journalists talked about some stunning new revelation by Mueller, or how this one specific piece of evidence is the smoking gun in the investigation?
While these reports are informing us, which is good, they’re also desensitizing us to the severity of the investigation, and it is severe. After all, the purpose of the investigation is literally to tell if the President worked with a foreign government to influence the result of an election in the US to favor him and his party.
That is a very big deal, but it’s hard to treat it that way. When there’s a headline every other day talking about some new evidence the investigation has found, you stop being shocked by it. Instead, it just becomes boring, and it all blends together.
This is a problem, because what the investigation is telling us is important, and it needs to be acted on. What we know now, which is only a fraction of what Mueller does, is enough to indict Trump with multiple felonies, and it has already been used to indict and convict many people close to Trump.
The difference between Trump and the other people being investigated, however, is that we can’t automatically indict him. There are laws stating that a prosecutor isn’t permitted to indict a sitting President, which means that Trump would need to be impeached before he could be indicted.
Impeachment is a deeply political process, and currently, only a portion of Democrats support it, a group that doesn’t even include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. On top of House Democrats needing to come entirely on board before impeachment charges could go forward, the Republican-controlled Senate would need to approve it by a two-thirds majority, meaning that at least 20 Republicans would have to join with Democrats to approve the charges and officially impeach Trump.
To get everyone on board, we would need irrefutable evidence of severe wrongdoing by Trump, along with a significant portion of both party bases supporting Trump’s impeachment.
Thanks to the media’s unintentional use of ad nauseam, getting public support in favor of impeachment has become nearly impossible. Everyone’s tired of discussing what’s been going on with the whole thing, as it’s been going on for a long time, and investigation bombshells are effectively becoming just another story.
There are also things that have begun flying under the radar altogether. For instance, just yesterday, Cohen claimed that Trump directed him to pay a small tech company to rig online polls to favor him (which, if you paid any attention to the 2016 election, you’ll know it failed spectacularly).
Again, this is big news. Not only did a company try to hack another company (Redfish Solutions tried to hack CNBC and The Drudge Report, in this case), but Cohen paid them to do it, which could constitute bribery, which is a crime, and Trump ordering it would also be a crime.
Despite this, I’m pretty sure very few people even knew it happened. I’m an avid reader of political news, and I only saw an article about this on CNN because it was relevant to my other research for this article.
To make matters worse, Trump has also engaged in gaslighting to make the public pay less attention to the Russia investigation, and trust is less when they do.
Just like ad nauseam, gaslighting is a propaganda technique, and in this case, it’s being used intentionally. Gaslighting is when someone tries to stir up doubt within a person or group of people through the use of denial, misdirection, contradiction and lying. Honestly, I don’t think a better description of Trump’s public strategy exists.
From the very beginning, Trump has been calling the Russia investigation a “witch hunt”, he’s very often misdirected from bombshell Mueller reports by either talking about controversial policy or, in the most recent case, announcing an address about the government shutdown, and Trump has lied repeatedly about the investigation, such as when he claimed he was cleared after a Mueller report showed Trump directed Cohen to give hush money payments.
This gaslighting has caused Trump’s base to completely distrust the Mueller investigation and any media outlets that report its findings. This has made Trump immune to the truth within the Republican base, and given that Republican public opinion will need to turn on Trump for him to be impeached, this has essentially protected him from prosecution for the rest of his term, and possibly until 2024, given that his reelection is well within reach.
So, with all of this said, where does this leave us?
The most recent controversy is most likely false, and deserved to be dismissed. It was reported by an unreliable source and wasn’t corroborate by anyone, and in fact, it was disputed by Mueller’s office.
Unfortunately, what the rapid dismissal of this allegation points to is a bigger problem with the public at large, which is that we’ve become tired of all of these reports by the Mueller team due to the media over reporting them. As the frequency and severity of these reports increase, so does our apathy.
The result is a public that won’t recognize when we truly have a smoking gun to bring President Trump down, and because mass public support is needed to impeach and indict Trump, this means that it may never happen. Trump will ride Presidential immunity to the end of his term, whenever it is, and given the statute of limitations for the majority of the charges that could be levied against him, he may never get charged with the crimes he’s committed.
