ELITE JOURNALISM IS BROKEN, BUT SO IS THE REST OF OUR SYSTEM, SO IT DOESN'T MATTER

This is the story of the day:

While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, "Confidence Man."

Much of the response to the story is anger at Haberman because she saved this information for her book rather than reporting it in real time:

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you become aware that someone may have committed a federal felony, it’s important to call the FBI and not save it for your next book

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) February 10, 2022

There was similar outrage in September 2020, when we learned from Bob Woodward's forthcoming book that Trump had described the COVID virus to Woodward as "more deadly than even your strenuous flu," an assessment at odds with the public statements he was making at the time and would make in the future.

We should have been told these things in a timely fashion. Reporters shouldn't keep information like this secret until they can reveal it in their books.

And yet it's hard to imagine that Woodward's story would have changed the trajectory of the pandemic, or public opinion of Trump, if it had been reported sooner. It's hard to see how Trump might have faced consequences for this, given how he dodged them for all the things we actually knew about. Woodward's book was published a couple of months before the election, but this story didn't have legs; it doesn't seem to have hurt Trump at the polls.

I assume Trump would have weaseled his way out of trouble. At the time, I wrote:

Confronted with his own words, Trump who's been lying longer than most of us have been alive, would have claimed that he'd been told a number of contrary things. He'd have claimed that the danger was contained because he personally had the virus under control. He'd have lashed out at everyone who wanted to use his words to enforce stricter public health measures -- and if he couldn't change the narrative right away, he'd have done it a couple of weeks later, just the way he did shortly after endorsing a (porous) shutdown of the country, when he angrily demanded reopenings and claimed the spring weather would magically make the virus go away, even as thousands died daily in New York City and elsewhere.

We can be fairly certain that Haberman's story wouldn't have made a difference at the time because we had many reports of document destruction by Trump during his presidency. In June 2018, Politico reported on Solomon Lartey, "the guys who tape Trump's papers back together."

Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”

In February 2020, Yastreblyansky noted that, according to a New York Times op-ed by a historian named Matthew Connelly, "Workers in the White House records management office who used to tape these records together say they were fired without explanation."

This was never a scandal. And when Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed in a 2018 book that she'd seen Trump eating a document, the story barely made a ripple.

So, yes, Haberman should have told us about the document-flushing when she knew about it, because it should have mattered. But it's unlikely that it would have mattered. We had very good reasons to believe that Trump was willfully destroying records in violation of the law -- but Trump wasn't held accountable, and if anyone had tried to hold him accountable, Republican outrage and wagon-circling would have made accountability impossible, as it has been throughout Trump's time in politics. So, yes, elite journalism is failing us -- but so is a system in which lawless Republicans have a veto over any attempt to make their own face consequences.