So Much Happening, So Little News

Let me see if I can tally up what's happened just since tbe new year:

• Trump raided Venezuela and removed its dictator
• Tim Walz dropped out of the Minnesota governor's race in the face of widespread allegations that he enabled Somali fraud
• There have been two ICE officer-involved shootings that appear to have been justified but badly misreported by legacy media
• Inchoate questions have been asked about who's funding national anti-ICE demonstrations
• Anti-government demonstrations have spread in Iran, leading to expectations that the mullahs may fall
• Trump has intensified his campaign to take over Greenland
• A coalition of NATO and other countries have organized to fund a continuing war in Ukraine
• The Trump administration has upped its efforts to investigate and eliminate fraud by and on behalf of illegal migrants.

The puzzling thing is how little intelligent or informed reporting or commentary we're seeing about any of these developments. For instance, what's the plan in Venezuela? I haven't even seen anyone ask this question seriously. What's the plan in Iran? Ditto -- nobody's asking. What's the plan for Greenland? What's the plan for Ukraine, with the Europeans now wanting to continue the war?

I feel certain that Trump and his immediate circle do in fact have plans for all this; that's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in the media is bright enoough to be able to prompt them to articulate those plans. For instance, yesterday we had a few reports that went like this:

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing preliminary plans for an attack on Iran, including the option of large-scale airstrikes.

Officials are considering how to follow through on President Trump’s recent elevated threats against the Islamic Republic, including what sites might be targeted, insiders told the Wall Street Journal.

A massive aerial strike campaign on multiple Iranian military targets is one option being considered — although Washington has not reached consensus on a plan of action.

If I were an editor, I wouldn't stand for this. Let's consider what we've learned about how Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth do business, based on what we've seen from the June B-2 raids on Iran and the strikes on Caracas: there's meticulous planning and execution based on thorough electronic and photographic intelligence. The idea that right now, they're just preparing preliminary plans and targeting options, but so far without consensus, is simply incredible.

On one hand, we might attribute media sluggishness to the mere speed with which all these developments have taken place, but this is in some measure due to continuing media inertia in the face of how Trump 2.0 works: his aim is to overwhelm the media with events. I think Mark Halperin unintentionally explains things in his rationale for his show The Morning Meeting: at 9 AM each weekday, the editors all get together and decide what the news items for the day will be and how they'll cover them.

The problem now is that Trump gets about four hours of sleep a night, and the rest of the time he's not asleep, he's working. He's calling cabinet secretaries at midnight and giving them new projects, and the results keep falling out throughout the day. A single morning meeting to figure out the day's spin isn't going to cut it.

He holds an oil executives' roundtable to talk about Venezuela, but oh by the way, he has important things to say about Greenland as well. Nobody in media, alt or legacy, is equipped to deal with this. We might expect more from alt media, but let's face it, they're amateurs, they can't write, and they can't think any better than legacy reporters and commentators.

I hate the idea that we've just got to expect to keep being surprised, but it is what it is. Trump is simply ahead of all of them.