In the tradition of the Clintonometer and the Trump Apocalypse Watch, the Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative daily estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump leaves office before his term ends, whether by being impeached (and convicted) or by resigning under threat of same.
On Friday, CNN retracted a story it had posted about a Trump supporter and fundraiser named Anthony Scaramucci. On Monday, three journalists involved with the story resigned. Subsequently, the president and his son Donald Jr. (who is friendly with several figures in what we might, a few years ago, have called the white supremacist fringe) sent a total of 18 angry tweets accusing CNN and the rest of the mainstream media of fabricating and promoting fake stories in a sort of collective anti-administration conspiracy. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed those themes at an afternoon press conference before being challenged by a reporter named Brian Karem in an exchange you can watch here.
Presidential administrations in the past, particularly conservative ones, have complained about and scapegoated the media. But suggesting that the media is annoying, biased, and sensationalistic is one thing; truly believing that the entire institution of the press is an enemy operation engaged in bad-faith national sabotage is another. As Gawker’s Alex Pareene has pointed out, national politics are increasingly controlled by gullible readers of nationalist/paranoid/extremist blogs and websites, and in their movement the idea of taking pride in free speech (as embodied in the free press) because it’s a component of American liberty—even in a chauvinistic way, as in “Americans are the freest people on God’s green Earth,” etc.—does not seem to exist. The white, anti-cosmopolitan, blue-collar ethnostate of Stephen Miller and Stephen Bannon’s fantasies is not the kind of place where you disagree with what someone says but you defend to the death their right to say it.
That doesn’t really change Donald Trump’s chances of getting impeached, but it does make me hope that, if he does, we can clean this entire toxic ideology out of the national consciousness, and send it back to the sewers, where it can be eaten by rats, and vanish.
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Peter Parks-Pool/Getty Images.
