You’re arguing with psychosis. They’re screaming about things that aren’t there.
The first task of defeating political opponents is to understand who they are. What is it that Democrats think they’re doing? And what they think they’re doing in 2026 amounts to a relentless ritual hallucination in the service of an institutional status quo. They’re making up a fake world in their heads to protect their paychecks: in media, in academia, in government, in the results-not-required world of the nonprofit organization.
If you doubt that, go read the opinion pages of The New York Times, the agenda-setting newsletter of the government and nonprofit class. You couldn’t possibly do better than to start with Nicholas Kristof’s Oct. 24 column about Mean Orange Man, the journalistic equivalent of a street crazy babbling to himself on a bus bench. The theme of the essay is American norms. Trump is a deviation; Kristof is fighting for things that are normal.
To borrow from Mary McCarthy: Every word is a lie, including “and” and “the.” Pick any paragraph. Here’s one: “Norms of self-restraint historically made the system work. Presidents did not try to crush law firms or universities, nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people. Presidents quarreled with allies but didn’t threaten to invade Greenland.”
Every word is insane and overwrought, but “nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people” is very special. There have never been armed federal officers in American cities before? Federal agents never shot anyone until Mean Orange Trump?
Carlos Boles was shot and killed by a deputy U.S, marshal in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. That same year, during the same presidency, an ICE agent shot at Daniel Noriega in Anaheim, California, but missed. Adrian Ricketts was shot by an FBI agent in New York City in 2012, when Barack Obama was president. Fernando Llanez was shot and killed by an HSI/ICE agent in June of 2016, in a suburb of San Diego, same president. Jamarion Robinson was shot by deputy U.S. marshals, dozens of times, in August of 2016, when Barack Obama was president.
This is only a partial list, but you get the point: Kristof says that things have gotten so bad under this monster Trump that federal agents are in our cities, shooting people, and this is a terrifying deviation from American political norms. What?
Or take, “Presidents quarreled with allies but didn’t threaten to invade Greenland.” If there’s one thing we know about American history for sure, it’s that no American president has ever threatened to invade anything before. Even if you just limit the argument to presidents threatening allies, Kristof’s case is still insane. Manuel Noriega was a longtime American ally until George H.W. Bush decided to invade Panama and capture him. Here’s a 2017 AP headline about his death: “Noriega, US ally turned target, dies after decades in jail.”
Henry Kissinger responded to the oil crisis by hinting broadly at the American willingness to use military force against the major oil-producing nations, and President Gerald Ford backed him up. No American president ever threatened to invade anything before? Again, what on Earth is this person talking about?
If no American president has ever dared to quarrel with our European allies, by the way, what was Eisenhower doing during the Suez Crisis?
The relentless handwringing and panic-mongering is literally unreal: It invents an American past that never existed, then laments its fake loss.
Kristof: “Other presidents redecorated; Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House, is building a ballroom and aims to construct a so-called Arc de Trump.”
Trump is so unspeakably evil that he’s … building a ballroom. What on Earth? President Harry Truman gutted the White House so completely that he spent three years of his presidency living at Blair House, which wasn’t a crisis at all. Neither is building a ballroom, an absolutely bizarre thing to depict as a devastating assault on American political norms.
Go through Kristof’s column and pick out something he identifies as shockingly unprecedented and a terrifying assault on American political norms, and see how many seconds it takes you to identify examples that disprove his argument. Don’t make it a drinking game, because you’ll be unconscious before you make the halfway mark.
If you dig under Kristof’s fantasy world claims, you begin to see what he’s doing. Sample claim: “Trump has worked to undermine the entire international system the United States created after World War II — for our benefit and the world’s — to promote peace, trade, prosperity and health. Ebola, poverty and Vladimir Putin are beneficiaries.”
The international system he’s describing is money trading hands. A system to “promote peace, trade, prosperity, and health,” like USAID and the State Department before Mean Orange Man laid off a bunch of employees, paid more people. It’s money: When Kristof wails about the loss of the international system founded on the strength of American political norms, he’s speaking for friends who lost grants and paychecks.
This fake-terror caterwauling is about cash, cash, and cash. Kristof describes “three pillars that explain the rise, strength and resilience of our nation,” and it’s all funding. The United States, he writes, “operates great universities and research institutions that are among the nation’s crown jewels,” but Trump “has variously attempted to defund them, cancel their tax-exempt status and make it harder for foreign students to enroll.”
Harvard’s endowment has grown to $68 billion, but Mean Hitler Trump is threatening their tax-exempt status. You begin to understand what norms Nicholas Kristof is trying to protect, and why he’s so worked up about it.
We head into an election talking about nothing – actually nothing: For the first time in American history, shattering our long-established norms, federal agents have guns and there’s construction at the White House, oh no. The wholesale manufacture of narrative distraction is the thing the legacy media are currently calling politics, and it’s fake from top to bottom. Treat it with the contempt it merits.
Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at "Tell Me How This Ends," here.