Despite having several years to learn about their quarry, most of the media never really figured out how to cover Donald Trump. Some journalists got better at it, sure: It became obvious that you couldn’t breeze past a follow-up question or forego a fact-check; by the end of his presidency many reporters had learned to tap reserves of discipline they’d never previously plumbed. And Trump’s superhuman ability to short-circuit the news cycle had lessened—though only to a degree.
Somehow, the press pulled a silver lining out of the January 6 insurrection, in that it ended with Donald Trump going away, in numerous ways. Chief among them was the way the aftermath resulted in his most powerful tool, his Twitter account, slipping from his hands. Trump was, in many ways, in exile. Literally, he ensconced himself at Mar-a-Lago, where he Colonel Kurtzed himself among sycophants and boxes of purloined documents; metaphorically, he was increasingly at a distance from the news. And it helped that he didn’t have much in the way of new material: He has continued to utter the same bombastic lies. For most of the last two years, he has largely been ignored.