Caffeinated Politics

This week can be summed up with a line from Robert Reich, who wondered if the Supreme Court would “rule the Constitution unconstitutional”. I suspect all of us were checking our news feeds this week at about 9 AM CT to find out what rulings had been handed down from the Court. Then, in many instances, we probably asked ourselves, ‘How did we get to this point?’ Which is what I want to comment on in this column.

There’s a particular rot in American politics that doesn’t come from policy differences, but rather from the partisan-grade production of false narratives. Lies that are turned into weapons. The entire mission is to inflame, divide, and destabilize. The fallout from those narratives even reached the Supreme Court.

Take the over-hyped and truly false-ridden narrative about fraudulent elections. The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that state laws allowing ballots to arrive after Election Day are legal. Despite the fact that no credible evidence has ever supported the idea of widespread election fraud, and despite courts, audits, recounts, and bipartisan officials confirming the integrity of the electoral process, there remains an unprincipled demagogue who simply refuses to be honest about the matter. Donald Trump has paraded it around as gospel. His easily led base falls victim to the lies. For the nation, it erodes trust in the very system that allows us to govern ourselves. It convinces millions that democracy is rigged, broken, or stolen. It turns neighbors who serve as poll workers into enemies and elected officials into targets. It’s not just irresponsible; it’s dangerous.

Then there’s the fever‑swamp myth about “brown babies” being born here as part of some demographic invasion that Tucker Carlson makes money on by spewing, which is a vile, racist and supremely grotesque distortion of birthright citizenship that’s been weaponized to stoke resentment and racial anxiety. It’s a narrative built on fear, not fact. We only need to read one line from Stephen Miller, who commented after the court ruling Tuesday morning, writing, “No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.” Racism on steroids. He reduced real families to political props and treated the Constitution like a suggestion rather than a guarantee.

The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, ruling that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are automatically American citizens.

There was a truly sad outcome from the Supreme Court ruling about trans athletes somehow taking over women’s sports. The Court’s decision upheld two state laws barring trans athletes from participation in girls’ and women’s sports, even as it stressed that the ruling did not establish broader restrictions. The reality about trans athletes before the ruling? There was no crisis. Addressing Congress in 2024, Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, said there were fewer than 10 trans athletes competing out of the 510,000 students who played college sports. Yet the false and mean-spirited narrative ballooned into a coast‑to‑coast panic, complete with sweeping bans and moral crusades. It’s a textbook example of how a single data point can be inflated into a political monster if the most awful people find it useful.

These three false narratives are from this week alone and were used so sinisterly that they were made into court cases the Supreme Court felt it needed to hear. We know why these narratives get too much oxygen in our nation. First, each of them is a strategy built to distract from real problems while manufacturing cultural enemies. We know that the bombast created by these ginned-up conflicts is profitable to the partisans who use them daily.

But the cost of this slimy way of operating is high for both you and me. We lose trust in institutions. We lose the ability to solve problems because half the country is busy fighting ghosts someone else invented. I have written the following line, in various ways, too many times over the past decade. Democracy doesn’t collapse in one dramatic moment, but instead erodes from a thousand corrosive lies, repeated loudly enough and often enough that people start mistaking them for truth. That is one reason I so thoroughly despise Donald Trump for what he is doing to our nation.

False narratives aren’t just bad politics. They’re a threat. And the longer we tolerate them, the more damage they do.