For the third of Americans who have stood resolutely by Donald Trump through revelations about his son’s “treasonous” colloquies with Russian agents, George Papadopoulos’s adventures in Europe, and Michael Flynn’s plea deal, the news that the president had attempted to fire Robert Mueller last summer did little to shake their faith. Still, the episode provoked the usual cognitive dissonance among Republicans, populists, MAGA-heads, and other self-styled deplorables. Perhaps nothing better encapsulated the latest twist in Mueller-gate than Sean Hannity’s reaction on Thursday night, when he spent the majority of his live show bashing the report, naturally, as fake news. “At this hour, The New York Times is trying to distract you,” he railed, alleging that he had personally checked in with his own sources and that they had denied the story. Minutes later, however, his Fox News colleague Ed Henry confirmed the story’s basic facts, and Hannity’s pivot shall live forever in cable-news infamy.

It was Hannity’s perverse defense of his flip-flop, however, that truly set the tone for the far-right in its approach to the Times bombshell. “I will NEVER EVER EVER run with @nytimes anonymous sources,” Hannity tweeted, and blasted the “liberal sheep” who thought he should. Journalists on Twitter sniggered, but the MAGA machine followed suit, adopting an ever-evolving variant of the Hannity logic: the Times story is false. Well, not entirely. But if there are elements that are true, it’s old news. And if not, people should stop freaking out anyway. The president can do whatever he wants. Besides, look at this story about Hillary Clinton keeping an accused sexual harasser on her 2008 campaign staff. But that other Times story? It’s a witch hunt.

That argumentative knot manifested itself in different ways. While CNN and MSNBC spent a substantial portion of the ensuing 12 hours period in eye-popping frenzy, Breitbart and the Drudge Report buried the Times story in their sidebars, instead highlighting Trump’s appearance at Davos and his heralding of the “America First” agenda. (By the end of Friday, the Mueller story had disappeared from Drudge’s page entirely, replaced with stories about Eminem attacking the president, a mass baboon breakout in Paris, and a car-surfing cat.) The Daily Caller expressed its skepticism in another way—not by directly discounting the Times story, but by running a piece about F.B.I agent Peter Strzok’s texts expressing doubts about the probe.

For other right-wing types, the Mueller bombshell was hardly a story at all—it was, after all, news from last summer. “It’s a seven-month-old story about something the president didn’t do,” Jack Posobiec, the controversial pro-Trump activist, told me in a text, pointing out that Newsmax C.E.O. Chris Ruddy had outlined the contours of the same story back in June. Back then, the White House had pushed back, saying that Ruddy hadn’t known what the hell he was talking about, and the Trump base had largely ignored the story, primarily because the possibility that Trump might fire Mueller was considered a non-issue. So when the Times reported that Trump had ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to send Mueller packing—and that McGahn had refused, forcing Trump to back down—the MAGA faithful yawned:

The feedback loop that runs between the White House and Fox & Friends often obscures the origin of Trump talking points. (As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported, Trump has, in a way, become the network’s de facto chief programmer.) But on Friday, with Trump six hours ahead on Davos, Switzerland, time, it was clearly the president who took the lead. By the time Fox & Friends was live from its north-facing Sixth Avenue studio, Trump had already provided the talking point of the day. “All right, well, the president says that’s fake news, it happened last June, it’s something we have to tell you have about because it’s a headline on The New York Times,” said Ainsley Earhardt, simultaneously dismissing the story as fake, old, and perfunctory. “What do you think about that, do you even care?” Judging from the crickets within the right-wing echo chamber, very few did.