Let me get my licks in on Howard Schultz because everyone online is already trashing him, and I see no reason why I can’t also join in on the fun. Anyway, the billionaire CEO of Starbucks—a joint where I’ve had to wait as long for a cup of tap water as long as you have to wait for a flat white—is giving double top secret consideration to running for president as an (ugh) independent in 2020. From the looks of things, Schultz is just another bored rich guy who can’t even guess the price of a box of cereal. He has no ideas of any sort, and he’s already limply waved off GOOD ideas that a majority of Americans support:

Has any of that stopped the DC political media from taking Schultz seriously and giving him airtime anywhere on every network? Of course not. Howard Schultz is a public billionaire, and thus an officially Important Person who gets to grace your television no matter how big of doofus he happens to be. I am hardly the first person to notice that, just a couple years ago, the mainstream media gave undue airtime to another seemingly hopeless vanity candidate. That candidate is now president. He also just put the government out of work for over a month and oversees juvenile immigrant concentration camps near our border. The election of Trump served as an ominous portent that we’ll be reliving 2016 for the rest of our lives, and America’s modern political machinery—both in terms of function and coverage—is giving him a big assist in making it a certainty.

Because this machine was not ready for him. Over and over, I’ve had to hear about Trump gleefully obliterating the sacred norms of Washington. He doesn’t hold shitty press conferences! He tweets naughty things! People on his staff quit! ZOMG THE NORMS! Well, I’m here to deliver good news to these purse-clenchers: the norms are still very much intact. If the norms were gone, we wouldn’t have Tom Brokaw sitting on a panel with useless pud Chuck Todd and openly musing about forcing immigrants to assimilate:

Brokaw, who already has been accused of sexual misconduct, faced no internal consequences over this dirge. The man is royalty at NBC News, a place that just adores wasting millions of dollars on brainless talent. So even though Trump spends every day groping hamburgers and doing his best to upend democracy, joints like NBC still feverishly cling to the archaic methods of coverage and analysis that got us into this mess to begin with.

This is all happening in the name of profit, because having universal consensus on critical matters is lousy for business for TV executives. But it's also because the modern political apparatus disguises all this craven greed in the name of objectivity. You might know objectivity in this space by the epithet of both sides-ism, like when the MAGA hat teen gets his own soft focus interview and redemption tour on Today before the Native American he publicly mocked even gets a mic pointed in his direction, and where the New York Times issues not just one, but multiple op-eds declaring that the real bad guy of the entire Nathan Phillips affair was, uh, social media?