He wasn’t the only one, although he appears to have been the only one who was directly conspiring with Trump. Rick Perlstein wrote about the tabloid support for Trump at the time. So did I, writing about the Drudge effect: Some years back, Washington Post reporters Mark Halperin (currently of Bloomberg News and MSNBC) and John Harris (now editor in chief of Politico) wrote a book about political journalism called “The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove and How to Take the White House in 2008.” In it, they made a famous admission about how Beltway journalism works in the digital age: Matt Drudge rules our world … With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts. So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too. Mitt Romney’s former spokesman called Drudge the political media’s assignment editor. And in 2012 on the day after the election, Halperin gave credit in where credit is due in a tweet: I had assumed that Matt Drudge’s star had faded a bit in the intervening years as fresher, sexier right-wing sites like Breitbart and The Blaze had emerged. But as Politico has reported, Drudge is doing better than ever: For the first time,…