Month after month, throughout Donald Trump’s mondo-bizarro post-presidency, our Great News Funnels have spewed out puzzle pieces in the form of breaking news.
They have landed in our laps and on our screens in no clear logical or chronological order. They were snippets reporting that our 45th president insisted upon keeping top-secret documents as his personal souvenirs. He repeatedly denied having them — right up until the documents were found and turned over to their proper owner: the U.S. government.
We know that being an investigative news journalist is hard work. But it is almost as hard these days to be an investigative news consumer. All year, it has been hard as hell for Americans to know for sure who was telling them the truth. So if you tend to reflexively believe your Republican Party leaders, you may have been understandably conned by the torrent of complaints that the FBI acted like Nazi Gestapo in wrongly searching Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, home and office not long ago.
