Suddenly, the truth matters

Trump does not ignore critics anymore

Something has changed, something important. The president was once invulnerable to the press and fact-finding. Candidate Donald Trump would say something outrageous and move on. President Trump does not.

Much of this is because campaigns are myth and administration is reality. He is accountable now — in a way he should have been held accountable as a candidate. Still, that is not all of it. As one witty Facebook post put it:

Before the election: “I love how tough Trump is.”

After the election: “Stop picking on Trump.” On a related note, how marvelous it is that fact-checking is back in vogue. News accounts that reflect poorly on Trump get parsed for every flaw and leap of logic. This is the same country that let statements like “Mexico will pay for the wall” pass by without a blink only last year.

That silly controversy about inauguration crowd size was when things began changing. That time, the president wanted to be believed. He did not want to just declare something, such as where Megyn Kelly might be bleeding from or that Sen. Ted Cruz’ father was pals with John F. Kennedy’s killer, then move on.

The president insisted his swearing-in crowd was the biggest. It was not. His claim was clearly, glaringly, unarguably false. He kept arguing for it anyway. He insisted his long-suffering surrogates keep making his ridiculous case. This episode is where the term “alternative facts” comes from, after all.

Apply that approach to everything since — up to and including the Russia connection scandal. That one matters. The scandal is fake, Trump says. He thinks that should be the end of it. The FBI director kept acting upon the scandal as a real one. So Trump fired the director — and appeared genuinely surprised and hurt by the backlash.

Now picture what would have happened if Trump had called director James Comey a “nut job” in public — and left him in place. That is what the candidate would have done. (For one thing, candidate Trump lacked the power to fire Comey.) Even if Comey found serious wrongdoing later, Republicans would not have believed him. Democrats, meanwhile, would have taken the investigation’s findings from a man they have vilified. Try making that stick.

Last year, Trump was acclaimed as a media genius. The press was putty in his hands. His GOP primary rivals could gain no traction. Trump dazzled news outlets, people said. Opponents could not match his “free” advertising worth billions of dollars.

Note how this view let those rivals and their ideologies off the hook for losing.

The media created Trump, serious people said. A Harvard study during the campaign “confirmed” it. The fact that press he received was almost unremittingly bad did not matter then.

Note that this explanation let pollsters and experts off the hook for failing to foresee Trump’s rise.

“Yes, the media poured it on — and five minutes of similar coverage would have killed a scripted campaign in a normal election.” I wrote that in a column published on March 5, 2016. But what do I know? I am just a wiseguy from Arkansas.

“Remember that British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?” I rambled on. “That got a lot of coverage, too. That story pushed other issues off the airwaves also. Former BP CEO Tony Hayward isn’t closing in on leadership of any major nation, however. It sure would be news if he was.”

The more immune to the media Trump appeared, the more his base loved him.

Even the Democrats bought the myth. How could their candidate compete with all Trump’s free publicity? A recording of Trump bragging about how being a celebrity granted him license to grope women could not change the election outcome, but boring stories about emails did, Democrats said.

Now Trump is getting his reality checked. What a surprise that, to many, this is also the fault of the press. Darn those leakers. And the same group at Harvard reports the president’s press coverage is almost totally bad. I guess that matters now.

Trump’s problems are not Trump’s fault, the argument goes — or the fault of those who elected him — even though he set some sort of land speed record for getting a special counsel named to investigate a White House scandal.

Maybe Trump is neither a master nor a puppet, a genius nor a fool. Perhaps it is time to stop making excuses for him. Perhaps those excuses are not for him. Perhaps they are for us.