Once upon a time, the question of what people were seeing on network news seemed an important reference point. It’s one thing to collect news nearly in realtime, as many do online, but even once upon a time when social media was not nearly so prominent in our lives, it seemed significant when a story made its way up from the murmer and buzz of alternate and specialized news into more mainstream sources like papers of record, evening news, and even the Sunday morning talk circuit. Toward which, George Stephanopoulos, on This Week:
Until now no American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation and sexual abuse. 
Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined by what’s happening in courtrooms than what’s happening on the campaign trail, until now.
The scale of the abnormality is so staggering that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflective habits, to treat this as a normal campaign where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power.
But that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.
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Image note: George Stephanopolous appears on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, 28 April 2024.
Stephanopoulos, George. “‘This Week’ Transcript 4-28-24: Trump’s Legal Landscape, State of Play in Battleground Georgia, and White House Natl. Security Comms Adviser John Kirby”. This Week with George Stephanopoulos. 28 April 2024.
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