“The 2024 Presidential Race Begins to Take Shape,” declared NPR this week, part of an early downpour of coverage. Eight hundred days from a vote, the world’s biggest analytical army is already working every angle to the election story but one: its own influence on the outcome.

The press is going to elect Donald Trump again. They did it once, tried again four years later, and now they’re on the hunt a third time. They hate him, but they keep doing him favors, the latest being an attempt to kill off his biggest primary rival.