Trump's Polls Stink, Oil Hits $90, and Conservative Media Found 34,000 Reasons to Relitigate 2021

The economy polls are brutal, the Iran war is stuck, and the Fauci texts arrived right on schedule. That's a content strategy.

Donald Trump’s is having a terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad week.

Economic numbers and the Iran War have led to what’s not just been the worst polling of his second term, but of his entire time in the White House. Miraculously, the conservative media finds itself in a frenzy over a man who left government three years ago. How convenient.

Let’s just take a look at how this is being covered on the right: Megyn Kelly pushed “Villain. Criminal. Sociopath. Shame on Anthony Fauci,“ to her audience. The Breitbart homepage is littered with tagged Fauci posts, all of which are hypercritical. Matt Walsh is leading a call for criminal prosecution, and two Republican senators appeared on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning to relitigate the summer of 2021.

Wherever you look on the right side of the worldwide web, one number keeps emerging: 34,000 texts recovered from Fauci’s government phone. But so far, only one text chain out of well over thirty thousand has been released. The drip drip drip is intentional, as the more the Fauci narrative takes up oxygen, no one has to talk about the price of gas, groceries, or a quagmire of an Iran War with no clear exit.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham clearly sees it as a content strategy. When she said “this is a big tease,” on her own show Monday night, she didn’t mean it as a complaint.

The delayed release has been explained by the senators behind it, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, who’ve insisted that their staff needs to review 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails for privacy issues before anything else goes out. Maybe that’s all this is, but it also doesn’t matter. Nearly everyone involved (on the right, at least) has good reason to keep the slow drip dripping.

This narrative works so perfectly for conservative media it feels like it was created in a lab, or maybe a think tank? It comes with a ready-made, familiar villain, a private archive no one's seen, and, during a disastrous news cycle, the right desperately needs a distraction.

Reporting this one chapter at a time has far greater impact: A full release is one news cycle, but a dozen or more text dumps? That’s a three-month season that takes us right to early November. Every unreleased voicemail gets its own segment, every future segment becomes a reason to tune in tomorrow.

I’m not saying anyone is intentionally slow-walking this dump (wink, wink), but you don’t have to believe anyone planned it out this way to see that nobody on the right has incentive to end it.

Now consider the news cycle that the Fauci story is replacing. Democrats are up by nine and ten points on the economy and inflation, respectively. Trump sits at 33 percent approval on the economy, and that’s all in Fox News’ own polling. The price of a barrel of oil hit $90 again this morning, and renewed hopes for reopening the Strait of Hormuz faded for what feels like the nth time. And two-thirds of Americans told a Post-Ipsos poll last month that groceries have become unaffordable. (SFX: Sad trombone)

The current vaccine fight is worse ground for the right than you’d think. Trump’s own pollster reportedly found vaccine skepticism a loser in the districts that decide the midterms, and White House advisers argued against rolling out Monday’s executive order at all. Which leaves Fauci as the only vaccine story conservative media can run at zero cost, and an archive this size means they can run it as long as they need to.

Does any of this make or even suggest this is a non-story? Absolutely not. We now know that Fauci raised the risk of miscarriage with the then-CDC director and surgeon general, then told the public days later there were no red flags. That’s the sort of credibility gap that his defenders insisted didn’t exist for years.

But that same private discussion included evidence that no safety problem had actually shown up among thousands of vaccinated pregnant women. Both things are true, and that’s the problem with the delayed release of texts, and a fair and reasonable telling requires the whole archive. A cynic might see this approach as the behind releasing a dozen text dumps instead of one big one.

Fauci made himself useful to his attackers and the media when he repeatedly pled the Fifth Amendment and didn’t fight back during Senate testimony, though one can understand his incentive. But Fauci also can’t lower the price of eggs or reopen a shipping lane that lowers the price of gas.

Anthony Fauci is not much more than a leftover villain from a fight that ended five years ago. In a media ecosystem that supports the party that controls the White House, the Senate, and the House, the only safe direction to point their anger is in the rear view mirror.

So let’s see how these texts get released against a news cycle that’s increasingly uncharitable to the Republicans in power. If five thousand texts drop tomorrow, I’m wrong and happy to say so. But if the drip slows when news for conservatives improves and quickens when it doesn’t? We’ll have a much better clue on the incentives at play.