Q: Can You Believe Anything You Read?

A: Not really, but some articles might give you useful information if you research them.

Today, the Washington Post came out with this story: “New poll has bad news for Trump, Biden, and the GOP field.” It purports to tell readers about yesterday’s CNN survey, which it describes at length. As you might expect, one major subject is whether Trump can win either the nomination or the general election now, in the wake of the Justice Department’s multi-count felony indictment against him.

The Post’s story tells us:

The poll is the first conducted entirely since Trump was arraigned on charges he illegally retained federal documents, including many highly classified secrets, and illegally defied various efforts by the government to retrieve them, including a subpoena, for about a year.

In that sense, it’s the first suggestion of an answer to the question of how this particular jeopardy, which even some of his past allies have described as extremely serious, might shape the battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

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The self-described billionaire remains the front-runner for the nomination. But some of his support inside the party has eroded, CNN noted its own write-up of its poll.

“Overall, 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning registered voters say Trump is their first choice for the party’s nomination for president, down from 53% in a May CNN poll,” Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy reported.

In other words, bad news for The Donald. Even his Republican support is slipping. And it gets worse:

Trump’s electability

One recurring criticism some of Trump’s rivals have leveled against him is that he not only lost in 2020 but cost the party control of the Senate and kept GOP numbers down in the House.

And you could imagine the field raising fresh questions about his chances after the government charged him – something like “Oh, we all love Trump, but this indictment will hurt him with the independent-voting normies we need to win.” Especially since 62 percent of independents in the poll said Trump should end his campaign now that he’s been charged.

What I’ve found with the Post — and just about every other organ of the MSM — is that you need to look for what you don’t see. The press does a good deal of its lying by what it says, but even more (in my experience) by what it omits, or says 38 paragraphs down the page in muffled, opaque language.

So what’s missing here?

What’s missing in a detailed story about whether Trump can get elected in the wake of his indictment is any information about how he’s polling post-indictment against the fellow he’s likely to be running against, Joe Biden. A suspicious person like me might think that an omission that conspicuous (once you think about it for ten seconds) might be (1) revealing, and (2) revealing in a way the Post would rather not mention.

And sure enough. Five Thirty Eight spills the beans:

The Five Thirty Eight sub-head is fair enough (“Trump-Biden Polling Is Steady Since the Federal Indictment”), although it could also have read, “Trump’s Previous Small Lead Over Biden Grows Slightly Since the Federal Indictment”).

As I’ve said before, DeSantis, not Trump, is my preference for President, in part because of Trump’s character deficits. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Trump’s general election polling has very slightly improved since his indictment, and the Washington Post’s long gloom-and-doom story about him, utterly ignoring this key fact — a fact it certainly knows — is at best misleading and at worst dishonest.

For anyone expecting this to improve over the next 16 months, I have this bridge………….