What time is the Trump arraignment? Here's how to watch live coverage and why you should

We are all so tired.

I get that. Donald Trump’s antics have exhausted us, and by “us” I mean everyone, including the media and their audiences, worn thin by the steady drumbeat of lies, denials and charges.

Well, everyone not wearing a MAGA hat and claiming some bizarre form of infallibility on behalf of the former president, who was indicted, again, on Tuesday. This time the charges relate to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, charges that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election — accusations of an out-and-out threat to democracy.

It’s the third time indictments have been returned against Trump, but these are by far the most serious.

Trump steadfastly denies he did anything wrong, which is pretty much his stock answer for anything.

We’ll find out if he’s right soon enough.

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When will Donald Trump be arraigned?

Trump is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges at 1 p.m. Arizona time on Thursday, Aug. 3 in Washington, D.C. Cable news channels are expected to cover it, and broadcast networks are likely to break from regular programming for at least part of the proceedings. It isn’t clear whether cameras will be allowed in the courtroom; for previous Trump arraignments, they weren’t or were limited.

“Previous Trump arraignments.” As in, here we go again.

We must resist the temptation of letting this feel normal

Trump gets indicted? The temptation is to think of it as, oh, just another Tuesday. That’s dangerous thinking. But it is also understandable thinking.

“It’s pretty strange to speak about indictments against a former president as routine, but when it comes to Trump, they have become strangely routine,” Michael Barbara said Wednesday in his introduction to “The Daily,” the New York Times podcast. “This is No. 3 in just the past few months.”

This is true. But it is anything but routine. Luckily Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for the Times, chimed in with, “Yeah, we’ve never seen anything like it in American history.”

Good man, Luke. It’s not just historic, it’s tragic, and it should be reported as such.

Every single time.

Journalists cannot water down the urgency of these stories just because they keep coming around time after time. A threat to democracy is, aside from everything else, a huge story — an important story, one that should never be downplayed, no matter how much familiarity sets in with audiences or critics.

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Trump has undermined faith in American institutions, including media

This is one of the things that Trump has done, in the same way that he has conditioned a certain segment of the population to ignore facts in front of their faces — if the facts don’t agree with his narrative. He has encouraged people to lose faith in the systems that have held democracy together.

One of those systems is legitimate media, which Trump constantly berates, along with his toadies like Kari Lake, the unsuccessful candidate for Arizona governor, who attacks any media that doesn’t spout the company line.

And it’s working. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 91% of respondents who rely on Fox News for their news do not think Trump has violated federal law. And depending on the day, Trump doesn’t even like Fox News much anymore. (Fox News likes him again, though.)

The media are somewhat complicit in this. They’ve long covered elections like a horse race — concentrating not on the choices opposing candidates offer voters, but on the real-time odds of their chances of winning. It’s numbing, and it shouldn’t be.

Worn-out notions of bothsideism have also clouded the clarity of truth-telling in journalism.

Trump, like any defendant, has the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in these cases. But when he lies about the election when defending himself, we must call it out.

When Trump’s campaign puts out garbage on Truth Social, an ultra-right-wing social media platform, saying the “persecution” of Trump is “reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s,” call it out. It's obscene.

And if Joe Biden gets indicted or lies about stolen elections, call that out, too. But the story right now is Trump’s indictments, plural. And we can’t lose sight of that.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Live coverage of Trump arraignment: How to watch and why you should