Eight plus eight is sixteen. Easy to remember. And it was on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2016, a date that will live in media infamy, that The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg announced, ostensibly on behalf of The Times but really on behalf of all major media outlets in America, that they were no longer to keep up the pretense—pretty threadbare by then in any case—that they were in the news business. Henceforth they were to be unabashed advocates for a rhetorical holy war against Donald Trump—and, eventually, what was to prove the Trumpist bloc of the American electorate. At the time, this revolutionary turn to advocacy—which was actually a return to a high-tech version of the media environment of the early days of the Republic—seemed an extraordinary measure, meant to have been justified only by the candidacy of someone allegedly far out of the mainstream of American politics. Once the anti-Trump campaigners had achieved their goal of defeating the Bad Orange Man, it was assumed that they would resume media life as we had known it up until 8/8/16.

Even after the Trump victory in that November’s election, it was widely supposed that the new president would serve less than a full term, either because of Russian “collusion” eventually to be uncovered by the Mueller investigation, or because of some other scandal, and that, once the aberrational president had been purged by means fair or foul, “normal” media service would