It's astonishing how many times this article acknowledges the fatuity of its own premise. Let's count! https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/1285617300683599872

"You don't have to believe in pivots to..." ONE!

"The latest course correction may not last..." TWO!

"...and may not matter..." THREE!

"...the window for positioning appears to be closing..." FOUR!

Remember back in high school, when you realized three quarters of the way through an English paper that you actually didn't agree with your own thesis, but you didn't have time to rewrite, so you just kept going, watching your argument crumble with every piece of new evidence?

11PM: "I will argue…"
12AM: "Some will suggest…"
1AM: "Of course…"
2AM: "To be sure…"
3AM: "While it seems…"
4AM: "It may appear…"
5AM: "Stranger still…"
6AM: "Also problematic is…"
7AM: "It may seem hard to reconcile…"
8AM: "What, then, can we make of…"
9AM: PRINT.

And what's the evidence of the Presidential Shift? There's nothing in the first graf, which is a throat-clearer. Nor in the second, third, or fourth, which are about upcoming events.

Here we go. Paragraph five. Can't wait. "The president is displaying a new tone and a new level of engagement, after aides and allies have pleaded with him to recognize the gravity of the moment."

"His tweet of himself wearing a mask..."

That's it. One tweet. THIS TWEET. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1285299379746811915

A tweet in which Trump referred to COVID as "the Invisible China Virus" and himself as "your favorite President." That's the pivot moment. That's the whole hook for the whole article.

I swear to you that I'm neither lying nor exaggerating. The rest of graf five contrasts the mask tweet (which goes entirely unquoted) with Trump's anti-mask comments the previous day.

This is the sixth graf in its entirety: "The latest course correction may not last, and may not matter. But political survival is a strong motivating force, and the window for positioning appears to be closing even as the big choices mount."

There is no seventh graf.

It's tempting, in these situations, to blame the headline writer. But again, this sentence is the core of the story: "The president is displaying a new tone and a new level of engagement, after aides and allies have pleaded with him to recognize the gravity of the moment."

This isn't a headline problem. It's a making-shit-up problem.

(I apologize for all the childhood traumas I unearthed with this thread, BTW.)

Has @rickklein landed yet?