I’m continually amazed at how the media keeps trying to find evidence Donald Trump is “pivoting” to a more reasonable approach, no matter how many times he yanks that football out from under them.

James Fallows referred to this particular phenomenon over the weekend…

Next wk will see collision of 2 powerful media instincts:
1) Story must change (‘doing better than you think’)
2) Bandwagon (‘losers lose’)

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) August 13, 2016

The media narrative “The underdog is improving and has a real shot” is simply too appealing as a plot device to let go of right now. So get used to seeing Trump isn’t as bad as we thought! memes for the next month.

Of curse, it also has utterly no basis in reality. News pundits just cannot resist putting everything into a some sort of potboiler plotline to string the viewing and reading public along until the debates.