it seems for whatever reason the above viewer omits it

I think some combination of having "Trump" in the title and theatlantic.com as the host and possibly something specific to the submitter penalized it so that it never hit the front page. Since hckrnews.com only shows articles that hit the front, it's not on there.

I'm only guessing, but see the graph here: https://hnrankings.info/43462783/. It doesn't show the clear drop that you'd expect with flags or flamewar, and doesn't appear to ever crack #59. If anything, it looks like it rose sharply when penalties were removed.