As friends of mine in the real world are well aware, I’m not a sports guy. I neither watch nor take part in any human contests involving individuals or groups of people running and hitting, carrying, or kicking a ball around a playing field.
But I have gone with friends to the batting cages a handful of times in my life. You stand behind a screen, holding a bat, and a pitching machine fires a baseball at you, fast. You swing, maybe hit it, maybe miss. And then after a few seconds of recovery, the next ball flies, at the same speed and in roughly the same place, and then again, and again.
At several points over the past ten years, I’ve thought that the experience of standing there in the batting cage, waiting for the next ball, is more than a little like the experience of being an opinion journalist in the Trump era. Only with one crucial difference: The pitching machine isn’t functioning correctly. Instead of hurling balls at regular intervals, at roughly the same spot, and with enough time between pitches to permit the batter to prepare for the next swing, the balls come in rapid and irregular succession, provoking anxiety and uncertainty, making proper preparation for the next pitch impossible. Instead of taking regular swings, the batter ends up looking like a maniac, swinging wildly and erratically in a desperate attempt to keep up and stay on top of the action.
Many of the weeks since January 20, 2025 have felt like this, but this past week more than most. It’s been exhausting. Demoralizing. It began with the No Kings protests last Saturday. For a week or more leading up to the events, Republicans portrayed them as Antifa-organized and Soros-funded astroturf operations bound to issue in anti-American violence. Instead, something on the order of seven million ordinary Americans participated in hundreds, maybe thousands, of demonstrations, and there were, it seems, no reports of violence anywhere. This didn’t stop a few enterprising disinformation merchants from highlighting stray signs with edgy, inciting messages, in an effort to make the expression of anodyne Trump disapproval sounds threatening. But mostly Republicans turned on a dime in response to reality and began describing the No Kings protests as sleepy gatherings of grey-haired white-skinned retirees.
Then there was the president himself, who capped off the weekend by posting an AI video on Truth Social of large streams of excrement falling on the heads of protesters in American cities.
Since the weekend, the news has been a chaotic mess, with multiple stories breaking, some of them catching fire with pundits but others disappearing as quickly as they surfaced. I recently reposted an essay of mine with the title “Judgment Is All We Have.” In the spirit of that post, I’m devoting this one to assessing a few of these stories, elevating some above the din, dismissing the significance of others. My judgment of which are more or less important doesn’t always match what other writers think. That’s fine, but it’s also worth laying out not just what I think, but why. That’s how one comes to understand the way an analyst’s judgments work. That can be useful, either in reinforcing why that person’s judgments are worthwhile—or why they aren’t.
The Week’s Most Overhyped Story
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