I was at the gym yesterday catching up on the latest Hardcore History podcast—seriously, Dan Carlin is national treasure—and I noticed something. According to the iTunes charts, one of the ten most popular podcasts in the country right now is produced by the Washington Post. It’s about Donald Trump, and it’s titled, “Can He Do That?” The implied answer here isn’t just obvious, it’s a journalism in-joke known as Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
As a general rule, the media should have an adversarial relationship with those in power, but this is descending into farce. Seriously, everything Trump does is going to prompt the question, “Can He Do That?” He has not been president for even three weeks, and the frame the media has chosen to embrace is that everything the man does is, by default, unconstitutional or an abuse of power. This level of media hysteria is discrediting to the media, unsustainable, and how America got Trump in the first place.
