• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 2, 2016

The other day, Donald Trump spoke to 5,000 followers at the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington. As he noted however, 600,000 others were prevented from entering the rally area. Or he may have just made a mistake, since there didn’t appear to be any large crowd waiting to get in.

Maybe those phantom 600,000 no-shows who Trump imagined are on to something. They've heard it all before.

It’s only June, but could it be that the online bloom is off the political rose?

Some stories earlier this week reported on Gawker’s declining popularity, blaming it on the bad publicity caused by the whole Nick Denton-Hulk Hogan-Peter Thiel war of words and money.

The  story with longer legs might be that traffic on sites that are heavily reliant on political news, features and innuendo--and that’s Gawker’s new focus--have all declined significantly.  

As reported by Variety, “millions of visitors to political Web sites vanished in April after months of healthy growth fueled by the contentious 2016 election season.”

According comScore, via Variety, Politico.com’s unique visitors were down a third; TheHill.com was down 35% and even TheBlaze.com, run by goofball Glenn Beck, was down 17%. ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight dropped 32%. The fact is, regardless of political bent, it seems political sites all hit the skids.

The far less provocative explanation is that March was more intense, politically, than April, though, really, how can you tell?

International Business Times says sites that either don’t cover politics much, or are so broad that politics is only a sliver of what they focus on, have fared better.

“During an election year, the personal is political,” writes IBT’s Brendan James.  “Just log on to Facebook, Twitter or even Snapchat and survey the steaming pile of political stories flooding your news feed courtesy of algorithms and the passions of your friends and family (if you’re still on speaking terms with them). But now, more than a year into Decision 2016, many Americans are beginning to feel campaign fatigue.”

It seems a little early for that, and on other hand, not a moment too soon.

The proliferation of video and vinegar-flavored clever attacks aimed at Clinton, Sanders and Trump, Trump, Trump are taking a lot of otherwise pleasant cruising out of sites and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. That leaves just a bunch of jagged edges of hateful “debate.”

I miss those stupid cat videos. I now look forward to celebrating some friend’s kid’s graduation like never before. Remember that nice Korean rock star who hopped around a lot? Those were good times. 

So if we’re getting tired of that kind of political news, thank god.  

It could be that like that throng of Trump supporters who skipped out of his Washington gig, all this name-calling stuff has finally gotten so redundant and unpleasant that people are learning to avoid it, despite the media’s industry’s daily servings.

It would nice to think all this stupid talk is just a passing fad.