Oh my God, is this true? He seems weak, uncertain, defeated perhaps—defeated by the thuddingly patient Iranians, defeated by inflation, defeated by his senescence, defeated by his vicious, over-amped attacks on illegal immigrants, defeated by the judiciary on an almost-daily basis, defeated by his egomania and crassness, the foolish monuments he wants to erect to himself.
Thank God, just found out, none of it is true. It turns out to be from a person who wants it to be true.
With each passing day it is becoming more obvious that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a mental illness and those afflicted are delusional. Notice that their emotional rants, like this one from Klein, have no facts or evidence to back up their perceived grievances.
The other thing I’ve noticed about this TDS mental illness is that those afflicted, psychologically project their own bad behavior onto President Trump and his supporters. It has gone beyond the fact-free hypocrisy that we’ve come to expect from the political left and the democrat politicians. They have become completely delusional and accuse President Trump and his supports of performing the appalling behavior that they themselves have done. For example:
• It is the left and their democrat party, not Trump, who “has ravaged the American spirit, made it an ugly and vengeful place, appealed to the worst in (them)”. In 2020 following the death of a convicted felon because of a fentanyl overdose he swallowed while resisting arrest the left rioted for over 170 days causing $2billion in damage, killing 35 people, injured over 1,500 police officers, set fire to a police headquarters and a historical church all the while being cheered on by democrats and their Pravda media. By contrast, following the assassination attempts on President Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, conservatives held prayer vigils.
• It is the left and their democrat party not Trump who have tried to “tip the balance away from tolerance, kindness, true diversity”, Trump has never slurred anyone who didn’t vote for him as “a dreg and a clinger”, “deplorable and irredeemable” and “garbage”.
• Why was there never a DOGE before President Trump? Elon Musk stepped away from his DOGE efforts, not because they were ineffective, but because they were so effective that radical leftists tried to destroy his companies by vandalizing the private property of Tesla owners.
• Pete Hegseth reversed four years of military decline because of woke and DEI policies that cratered recruitment. Now military recruitment exceeds objectives.
• While they screech to "follow the science", I haven’t seen anyone on the political left or their democrat party who is capable of understanding science, from their embrace of unscientific climate alarmism religion, their economic and environmental disastrous embrace of wind and solar technologies which are propagandized to coverup the kickback to politicians from “green” donors, to their demonization of RFK Jr’s spot on attack on the corrupt big pharma/incompetent US government healthcare crime organization/bureaucracy.
• Internationally, after the total capitulation of Obama/Kerry to the Iranian Mullahs with their moronic nuclear deal and flying them plane loads of cash which the Mullahs used to buy and build missiles to protect their nuclear weapons development and the disastrous autopen Biden administration’s historic military failure in their withdrawal from Afghanistan to meet an artificially imposed deadline of 9/11, they have no grounds to criticize the Trump administrations’ historic foreign policy successes. The Trump administration's unprecedented successes include taking out ISIS, the Abraham accords, saving the Venezuela people, decimating the Iranian Mullah terrorists and their leaders, strangling their economy through sanctions and blockades for $500billion a day and severing their funding of the Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis terrorist organizations, jawboning NATO partners to contribute their promised share of investment for their own benefit, cutting off the offshore money laundering extortion of US taxpayer dollars in Ukraine and respecting the ballot referendum result of the inhabitants of Crimea and the Donbass to return to Russian sovereignty, etc., etc., etc.
• I don’t see any MAGA men “hiding themselves in basements, staring at screens” or crying that “AI will destroy jobs”. On the contrary, they get an education that doesn’t end with some worthless “studies” label. Some of them build American physical infrastructure (like the improvements that the master builder President Trump is overseeing in DC) and some even build and support AI technology and opportunities.
If Klein is “scared” it is because of his own ignorance and TDS mental illness.
No one says any of this more eloquently than my dear friend Joe K. " America always was a balance between great good and persistent, minor chords of evil."
I’m not an optician, but rhe Atlantic’s breadth seems to have made your vision more keen. You’ve given astute witness to our ills and Trump’s stench. I will, however, forgive the Dems for their tolerance. At least, they’re practicing inclusion, not its antithesis, which never-you-minds the abiding strength of our melting pot nation.
The Dems are not practicing tolerance. They are intolerant and recalcitrant. They are willing to let Trump rule if they can keep their identitarian extremism. They make distinctions according to race. They refuse to question, or impose limits on, the barbaric “trans” fad, even for children. They won’t admit an end-date after which abortion constitutes murder. So, I wonder: do you believe that Trump is worth all this spurious “tolerance”?
You got me on that one. Nope, I revile Trump. And, yes, I balk at the bastardization of my beloved language when I’m faced with calling someone “they.” But…but…but… Joe, we’re moving past identity politics by dint of Trump’s reactionary policies. That said we ain’t gonna put this genie back in the bottle. Our nation’s history had been an inclusionary slog — women’s suffrage, civil rights, equal rights, unions, farm workers, and now people with different gender IDs who by the way have been with us, ummm, like forever.
Evidence please? A Democrat who is opposed to racial favoritism? A Democrat who says two parents are better than one? A Democrat who says surgical or chemical sexual identity decisions should wait until adulthood? And on and on...this is extremist insanity. It has made Donald Trump president of the United States and empowers his movement going forward. Thank about it. This is important.
Forgive me on that one, JOE. I’m embarassed for the miscue. Respect your writing too much. Plus, this now retired journalist has been reading you as an exemplar since you were at Newsweek and TIME!!!
Looks like the Dems are already leaning your way in the form of campaigns by James Talerico, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and others.
However, while I welcome this shift, I will take issue with moral and personal issues being legislated by the state, as you seem to infer. That’s a slippery slope.
Won’t work. Dems won’t deal with racial preferences, trans-extremism, feminist censorship of the language, immigration limits…those are values my friend EJ won’t touch—nor will the party.
Americans want brashness as an antidote to the daring illiberalism but the moderate Dems can’t seem to deliver that. A moderate myself, we need to grow a set and take a courageous risk. Trump did it and won for a while. Come up with something drastic and don’t be scared to lose as we are already on a dead-end track anyway. Time to get nutty!
I am with Joel on this. Perhaps because I read the Free Press and know Weiss's story. I wonder if you do. If Weiss was an avowed progressive, she -- a woman, a lesbian, a person under 60 -- founding a successful business and then taking this job at a network- would be a darling of the media. Unfortunately for America, the lesson we are learning is that one who fails to check EVERY box on the progressive Dems score card will be attacked and brought down.
Also, would you be prone to distrust a man because he was too clever and successful?? Think about it.
I would absolutely distrust a man for the same reasons. I wanted to trust and respect Bari Weiss, and I have read the Free Press now and then. But some of the things she has said (for example I remember a comment about abortion) are unacceptable to me.
Premature maybe for her handling of 60 minutes (although it seems awful). But she was never the appropriate choice for the role. I am judging her from what I have read in the Free Press. We must agree to disagree here.
Terrific column. My husband and I travel to Europe 3 months a year and the view always seems a bit different from the other side of the Atlantic. The only disagreement I have is your take on Bari Weiss. I have been a subscriber to The Free Press since my son said I should check it out.
However, for someone that has not had experience in TV to come in and summarily dismiss a group of people, some there over 20 years, without cause says something to me about just the thing you were talking about…character. On that subject, I think Pelley was overly wrought, but I would hope I would defend people that I have been working with for 20 years, too, and keep asking for at least an explanation.
To be part of a national party is to engage in a constant process of tolerance. I'm no fan of the working man cosplay of Graham Platner or the cranky righteousness of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but they are part of the coalition we have right now and this is certainly an "all hands on deck" situation. I do think that many politicians are a bit too indulgent of the Party's most left-wing voices but let's be clear - we lost the Presidency in 2000, 2016 and probably 2024 due to the left wing's self-destructive tendencies and, in politics, memories are long. More to the point, it does ill to tell the folks in Maine what to think and who to choose, there is a point where you have to swallow hard and live by the choice they made. What DOES need to happen is for folks to explain to the chattering classes and their journo fellow travelers, who drive so much of the debate within the Democratic umbrella, the extent to which the trans obsession alienates the great majority of Americans, that equity is a pointless and eventually destructive pursuit, that the censorious tone of much of our politics is a guaranteed loser. With a few dramatic exceptions, the rank and file are choosing comparative moderates in these primaries, one can only hope that momentum continues in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, Joe, am hoping you can devote some time to explaining what is going on over on the other side of the pond - it seems that Britain is caught in a fit of pessimism and rancor similar to ours but without the vengeful idiocy at the helm. What is bedeviling them? Certainly they, too, do not have brilliant political leadership but as near as I can tell they have a PM that is trying to do the right thing. Are they going to succumb to this whiny populism that has brought so much misery to our country? The world remains on a knife edge, the recent results of Hungary notwithstanding, and we cannot lose another proud democracy. Be interested to hear what is going on in the pubs.
Thank you for the article, Mr. Klein. Gasoline here in or at the Oklahoma border is 3.79 per gallon. Groceries are skyrocketing and movie theaters tickets are at twenty dollars a ticket. Our very lives and freedoms are at stake.
Oh my God, is this true? He seems weak, uncertain, defeated perhaps—defeated by the thuddingly patient Iranians, defeated by inflation, defeated by his senescence, defeated by his vicious, over-amped attacks on illegal immigrants, defeated by the judiciary on an almost-daily basis, defeated by his egomania and crassness, the foolish monuments he wants to erect to himself.
Thank God, just found out, none of it is true. It turns out to be from a person who wants it to be true.
Well stated and spot on!
With each passing day it is becoming more obvious that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a mental illness and those afflicted are delusional. Notice that their emotional rants, like this one from Klein, have no facts or evidence to back up their perceived grievances.
The other thing I’ve noticed about this TDS mental illness is that those afflicted, psychologically project their own bad behavior onto President Trump and his supporters. It has gone beyond the fact-free hypocrisy that we’ve come to expect from the political left and the democrat politicians. They have become completely delusional and accuse President Trump and his supports of performing the appalling behavior that they themselves have done. For example:
• It is the left and their democrat party, not Trump, who “has ravaged the American spirit, made it an ugly and vengeful place, appealed to the worst in (them)”. In 2020 following the death of a convicted felon because of a fentanyl overdose he swallowed while resisting arrest the left rioted for over 170 days causing $2billion in damage, killing 35 people, injured over 1,500 police officers, set fire to a police headquarters and a historical church all the while being cheered on by democrats and their Pravda media. By contrast, following the assassination attempts on President Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, conservatives held prayer vigils.
• It is the left and their democrat party not Trump who have tried to “tip the balance away from tolerance, kindness, true diversity”, Trump has never slurred anyone who didn’t vote for him as “a dreg and a clinger”, “deplorable and irredeemable” and “garbage”.
• Why was there never a DOGE before President Trump? Elon Musk stepped away from his DOGE efforts, not because they were ineffective, but because they were so effective that radical leftists tried to destroy his companies by vandalizing the private property of Tesla owners.
• Pete Hegseth reversed four years of military decline because of woke and DEI policies that cratered recruitment. Now military recruitment exceeds objectives.
• While they screech to "follow the science", I haven’t seen anyone on the political left or their democrat party who is capable of understanding science, from their embrace of unscientific climate alarmism religion, their economic and environmental disastrous embrace of wind and solar technologies which are propagandized to coverup the kickback to politicians from “green” donors, to their demonization of RFK Jr’s spot on attack on the corrupt big pharma/incompetent US government healthcare crime organization/bureaucracy.
• Internationally, after the total capitulation of Obama/Kerry to the Iranian Mullahs with their moronic nuclear deal and flying them plane loads of cash which the Mullahs used to buy and build missiles to protect their nuclear weapons development and the disastrous autopen Biden administration’s historic military failure in their withdrawal from Afghanistan to meet an artificially imposed deadline of 9/11, they have no grounds to criticize the Trump administrations’ historic foreign policy successes. The Trump administration's unprecedented successes include taking out ISIS, the Abraham accords, saving the Venezuela people, decimating the Iranian Mullah terrorists and their leaders, strangling their economy through sanctions and blockades for $500billion a day and severing their funding of the Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis terrorist organizations, jawboning NATO partners to contribute their promised share of investment for their own benefit, cutting off the offshore money laundering extortion of US taxpayer dollars in Ukraine and respecting the ballot referendum result of the inhabitants of Crimea and the Donbass to return to Russian sovereignty, etc., etc., etc.
• I don’t see any MAGA men “hiding themselves in basements, staring at screens” or crying that “AI will destroy jobs”. On the contrary, they get an education that doesn’t end with some worthless “studies” label. Some of them build American physical infrastructure (like the improvements that the master builder President Trump is overseeing in DC) and some even build and support AI technology and opportunities.
If Klein is “scared” it is because of his own ignorance and TDS mental illness.
Great piece. Housing is definitely more expensive in London 🤠
Not in our experience.
No one says any of this more eloquently than my dear friend Joe K. " America always was a balance between great good and persistent, minor chords of evil."
I’m not an optician, but rhe Atlantic’s breadth seems to have made your vision more keen. You’ve given astute witness to our ills and Trump’s stench. I will, however, forgive the Dems for their tolerance. At least, they’re practicing inclusion, not its antithesis, which never-you-minds the abiding strength of our melting pot nation.
The Dems are not practicing tolerance. They are intolerant and recalcitrant. They are willing to let Trump rule if they can keep their identitarian extremism. They make distinctions according to race. They refuse to question, or impose limits on, the barbaric “trans” fad, even for children. They won’t admit an end-date after which abortion constitutes murder. So, I wonder: do you believe that Trump is worth all this spurious “tolerance”?
You got me on that one. Nope, I revile Trump. And, yes, I balk at the bastardization of my beloved language when I’m faced with calling someone “they.” But…but…but… Joe, we’re moving past identity politics by dint of Trump’s reactionary policies. That said we ain’t gonna put this genie back in the bottle. Our nation’s history had been an inclusionary slog — women’s suffrage, civil rights, equal rights, unions, farm workers, and now people with different gender IDs who by the way have been with us, ummm, like forever.
Evidence please? A Democrat who is opposed to racial favoritism? A Democrat who says two parents are better than one? A Democrat who says surgical or chemical sexual identity decisions should wait until adulthood? And on and on...this is extremist insanity. It has made Donald Trump president of the United States and empowers his movement going forward. Thank about it. This is important.
Oh, and the name is Joe, short for Joseph, not Joel...like my great friend Joel Klein.
Forgive me on that one, JOE. I’m embarassed for the miscue. Respect your writing too much. Plus, this now retired journalist has been reading you as an exemplar since you were at Newsweek and TIME!!!
Evidence? Evidence? Looks like E.J. Dionne Jr. delivers it in this recent NYT essay, “Republicans Thought They Owned ‘Values.’ Not Anymore.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/opinion/democrats-politics-morality-values.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Looks like the Dems are already leaning your way in the form of campaigns by James Talerico, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and others.
However, while I welcome this shift, I will take issue with moral and personal issues being legislated by the state, as you seem to infer. That’s a slippery slope.
Won’t work. Dems won’t deal with racial preferences, trans-extremism, feminist censorship of the language, immigration limits…those are values my friend EJ won’t touch—nor will the party.
Americans want brashness as an antidote to the daring illiberalism but the moderate Dems can’t seem to deliver that. A moderate myself, we need to grow a set and take a courageous risk. Trump did it and won for a while. Come up with something drastic and don’t be scared to lose as we are already on a dead-end track anyway. Time to get nutty!
I'm with you most of the way, but not on Bari Weiss..she seems a bit too clever for her own good- I don't trust her.
I am with Joel on this. Perhaps because I read the Free Press and know Weiss's story. I wonder if you do. If Weiss was an avowed progressive, she -- a woman, a lesbian, a person under 60 -- founding a successful business and then taking this job at a network- would be a darling of the media. Unfortunately for America, the lesson we are learning is that one who fails to check EVERY box on the progressive Dems score card will be attacked and brought down.
Also, would you be prone to distrust a man because he was too clever and successful?? Think about it.
I would absolutely distrust a man for the same reasons. I wanted to trust and respect Bari Weiss, and I have read the Free Press now and then. But some of the things she has said (for example I remember a comment about abortion) are unacceptable to me.
C'mon guys. The main thing you take from this is my saying that it's premature to judge Bari Weiss? Aren't you proving my point?
Premature maybe for her handling of 60 minutes (although it seems awful). But she was never the appropriate choice for the role. I am judging her from what I have read in the Free Press. We must agree to disagree here.
Loved the article and have shared it. I should have led with that.
Terrific column. My husband and I travel to Europe 3 months a year and the view always seems a bit different from the other side of the Atlantic. The only disagreement I have is your take on Bari Weiss. I have been a subscriber to The Free Press since my son said I should check it out.
However, for someone that has not had experience in TV to come in and summarily dismiss a group of people, some there over 20 years, without cause says something to me about just the thing you were talking about…character. On that subject, I think Pelley was overly wrought, but I would hope I would defend people that I have been working with for 20 years, too, and keep asking for at least an explanation.
To be part of a national party is to engage in a constant process of tolerance. I'm no fan of the working man cosplay of Graham Platner or the cranky righteousness of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but they are part of the coalition we have right now and this is certainly an "all hands on deck" situation. I do think that many politicians are a bit too indulgent of the Party's most left-wing voices but let's be clear - we lost the Presidency in 2000, 2016 and probably 2024 due to the left wing's self-destructive tendencies and, in politics, memories are long. More to the point, it does ill to tell the folks in Maine what to think and who to choose, there is a point where you have to swallow hard and live by the choice they made. What DOES need to happen is for folks to explain to the chattering classes and their journo fellow travelers, who drive so much of the debate within the Democratic umbrella, the extent to which the trans obsession alienates the great majority of Americans, that equity is a pointless and eventually destructive pursuit, that the censorious tone of much of our politics is a guaranteed loser. With a few dramatic exceptions, the rank and file are choosing comparative moderates in these primaries, one can only hope that momentum continues in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, Joe, am hoping you can devote some time to explaining what is going on over on the other side of the pond - it seems that Britain is caught in a fit of pessimism and rancor similar to ours but without the vengeful idiocy at the helm. What is bedeviling them? Certainly they, too, do not have brilliant political leadership but as near as I can tell they have a PM that is trying to do the right thing. Are they going to succumb to this whiny populism that has brought so much misery to our country? The world remains on a knife edge, the recent results of Hungary notwithstanding, and we cannot lose another proud democracy. Be interested to hear what is going on in the pubs.
Freedom for who is the question, as it has always been.
For you and me, pal...and most everyone else. Hope you're well.
Thank you for the article, Mr. Klein. Gasoline here in or at the Oklahoma border is 3.79 per gallon. Groceries are skyrocketing and movie theaters tickets are at twenty dollars a ticket. Our very lives and freedoms are at stake.