Then CNN played the tapes. Mostly they contained rather humdrum business dealings. At one point they apparently talk about buying the rights to a story about a Playboy model who says she had an affair with Trump. You can’t hear Trump’s part of the conversation, but whatever he said, it wasn’t illegal or terribly shocking. The tapes were still ballyhooed by the media but any honest and objective person who listened to them couldn’t help but think: if this is the worst thing that Trump ever said to his lawyer, maybe he isn’t the criminal mastermind he’s been made out to be.

The tell-all books, the impeachment proceedings, the various investigations by various panels and committees and agencies, all have the same sort of effect. Sometimes they uncover things that aren’t very flattering, sometimes those unflattering things might even be true, but nothing ever befits the image of Donald Trump as the embodiment of evil, a fascist dictator, corrupt to his bones. Many people have been searching to find where the bodies are buried, and many “inside sources” have claimed to have the coordinates, yet no one has ever turned them up. Maybe that’s because there simply are no bodies at all.

This is what comes to mind when reading about the Next Big Media Scoop That Will Bring Trump Down For Real This Time Seriously. The New York Times has obtained Trump’s tax records. And by “obtained” we mean that someone Trump trusted with his finances turned around and gave his personal information to the media. If there’s any crime uncovered here, it’s the crime that was committed in the uncovering.