Holman Jenkins deploys the kayfabe frame to license Democratic surrender. That sentence is the operation the column performs, not the claim the column makes. Jenkins’s “Democrats Can Learn From AOC,” published on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page in August 2026, proposes a tactical model for ambitious Democrats built on the editorial board’s preferred policy premises and instructs the next Democratic candidate in the rhetorical steps required to deliver the party’s working-class coalition to those premises. The instrument is the kayfabe frame: tell the reader the press is performing, perform the case for the press’s performance, and call the gap kayfabe. The frame recasts every critical coverage of Trump as costume and licenses a successor Democratic politics built on WSJ terms. Message discipline with a byline — the apparatus writing the opposition’s confession and dressing it as counsel.
I drafted memos of this kind. What an operator notices first when reading a piece built this way is the catalogue entry — frame-engineered relabeling, multiple-audience-targeting, deficit double standard, kayfabe-as-master-frame — arriving on cue in the editor’s preferred vocabulary. That is the analytical substrate for what follows.
A class of ambitious Democrats could take a lesson from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her artlessness is exactly what was wanted in disowning what she called “Woke 1,” a set of policy ideas that would be death to anyone who wants a future in national politics.
Just disown it and make a spectacle of disowning it. It was a brainless detour. Forget it ever happened, she seemed to say on ABC News’s Sunday show.
Read the stage direction before you read the argument. The technique is the simulation of the spontaneous — a sincerity-form of astroturfing: the operator writes the cue, the mark performs the conviction, and the audience is told it is watching candor. The tell is in “make a spectacle of disowning it.” Real disowning does not need a production note. A spectacle is a show. The relabeling does its work in the same breath: “a set of policy ideas that would be death to anyone who wants a future in national politics.” Policy ideas are not a death sentence. That is frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ Editorial Technique Catalogue §4.1; Bad-Faith Techniques Catalog frame_engineered_relabeling; Bandura: euphemistic labeling — a record re-described as a contagion, so that renouncing it sounds like survival instead of surrender. The bracket would have to name specific provisions — defund-the-police, single-payer healthcare, open-borders or decriminalization-of-illegal-entry, the Green New Deal — to be a category rather than a dismissal. The page refuses the specification because the specification would force the page to defend the disavowal on substance, and the bracket-deviant move’s work is to absolve the disavower of having to defend anything. The instruction to make a spectacle is the confession that it is a show. The disowning is the surrender; the spectacle is the packaging.
The AOC reference itself is doing analytical work the column does not name. AOC is a Democrat who is useful to the editorial page because her tactical positioning — disowning “Woke 1” — can be deployed as a model the page wants other Democrats to imitate. The page is not arguing that AOC’s policy positions are wrong; the page is arguing that AOC’s tactical disavowal is the right move, in part because the policy positions were “death to anyone who wants a future in national politics.” The page wants the disavowal without the disavower having to defend what was disavowed. The reader who absorbs this paragraph absorbs the page’s preferred ordering: first the disavowal, then the future.
I long thought the only real Democratic hopefuls in 2028 would be those who spent the past decade outside of Washington, like Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Rahm Emanuel. I might waive the out-of-Washington rule for Rep. Ro Khanna if he weren’t so intent on miscalculating on Jeffrey Epstein as his broom to batch-dispatch his rivals.
Multiple-audience-targeting — WSJ Editorial Technique Catalogue §4.3 — operates across the named hopefuls. The named list — Beshear, Shapiro, Whitmer, Emanuel, with Ro Khanna conceded as a near-miss on the Epstein miscalculation — addresses the political-class audience segment: operatives, donors, would-be kingmakers who are choosing the next Democratic nominee now. The framing telegraphs that the choice is being constrained to figures who stayed outside the party’s recent past; the would-be nominee absorbs the constraint as audience instruction. The piece is not analyzing the hopefuls. The piece is curating them. Note the kingmaker posture before the payload: “I might waive the rule.” The columnist admits candidates, ranks them, dismisses one in a parenthetical — Rep. Khanna dispatched as a man “intent on miscalculating on Jeffrey Epstein as his broom to batch-dispatch his rivals,” which is an accusation with no evidence attached, imagery standing in for argument.
There’s a better way. In imitation of AOC, find a venue to say: “Of course it was wrong for Democrats to fabricate evidence of collusion. It was wrong to mobilize the CIA and FBI to lie to voters. The Biden grift? The most irresponsible thing ever. Even in hopeless contests against an FDR or Eisenhower, both parties always did their duty and gave Americans someone to vote for. Democrats failed in 2024.”
Then the payload, and the payload is the technique: the ventriloquized confession. Motte-and-bailey from the catalog. Every contested assertion in those quotation marks — fabricated collusion evidence; the CIA and the FBI mobilized to lie to voters; the “Biden grift” — is written in the voice of a speech the columnist drafted for someone else to give. Challenged, it is only a suggestion, a speech “they might make.” Adopted, it becomes the party’s own confession, and the house account of the decade becomes the record both sides finally agree on. The receipt for how little that account rests on: every body that examined the Russia matter — special counsel Mueller, the Justice Department inspector general, special counsel Durham, whose mandate was to find exactly this kind of misconduct — stopped short of “fabricated evidence of collusion.” The one documented act of falsification to come out of the whole matter was Kevin Clinesmith’s altered email, the work of a single FBI lawyer, not a mobilized intelligence community. The “Biden grift” went through a special counsel and a House impeachment inquiry; it produced no indictment and no articles. Jenkins asserts these as the confession a serious person makes. They are the apparatus’s talking points, dressed as the Democrats’ overdue honesty.
The strawman — Bad-Faith Techniques Catalog strawman — operates in the “fabricate evidence of collusion” formulation. The Mueller investigation, the Durham inquiry, and the various Senate and House intelligence-committee work on Russian interference in 2016: the public record on each is documented and contested, and “fabricate evidence” as a characterization of that record is not the public record’s own characterization. The page has a stake in the most-aggressive possible rendering because the most-aggressive possible rendering is what licenses the next sentence — the CIA-and-FBI mobilization claim — and the next sentence after that. The strawman chain is the surrender script’s spine.
The “both parties always did their duty” line is doing quieter work, and it is the deficit double standard — WSJ Editorial Technique Catalogue §4.4. The line invokes a Golden Age that did not exist; asks the reader to accept the 2024 cycle as an unprecedented failure without naming what the precedent standard actually was; and locates the failure on the Democratic side alone, with no parallel accountability asked of the Trump campaign, the Trump legal challenges, or the press coverage Jenkins will shortly describe as kayfabe.
The model speech addresses a second audience — the would-be nominee herself. The speech is a surrender script. Note what it asks the speaker to disavow, and in what order: “fabricate evidence of collusion” first; “mobilize the CIA and FBI to lie to voters” second; “the Biden grift” third; then the meta-frame that “Democrats failed in 2024.” The script asks the speaker to accept the editorial board’s preferred reading of the past decade before the speaker is permitted to propose anything about the future. The catharsis Jenkins promises on day three is a catharsis to the page’s premises, in the page’s vocabulary, on the page’s terms.
On day one, the media would try to ignore such a speech. On day two, the press would try to shoot it down.
On day three, a catharsis would begin like the Mississippi overflowing its banks. The speaker would benefit by wrong-footing half the Democratic firmament. He or she would become instantly votable to much of America that voted for Mr. Trump.
Why hasn’t it happened already? This was obvious when two of these hopefuls visited the Journal last year. Recall Chuck Schumer at the start of the Trump era: Don’t make an enemy of the intelligence agencies. “They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Now the prophecy. This is the engineering of consent presented as its prediction. Jenkins does not forecast the media’s three-day arc; he scripts it, and the script is a sales pitch: the target is told the payoff in advance, so the confession reads as fate instead of instruction, and the audience is told the release is coming, so the release reads as destiny instead of direction. “Catharsis” is the giveaway — Aristotle’s word for the audience’s emotion. Jenkins has written the audience’s reaction before the show; he is selling the ticket to the release he has scheduled. Then the Schumer quote, where the frame goes dark. Readers with decent memories will recall that Schumer’s warning, at the start of the Trump era, was aimed at Trump — his point was that the intelligence community punishes politicians who take it on. Jenkins re-addresses the warning to the Democrats, and in the re-addressing converts the agencies into what his argument needs them to be: a faction with grudges to spend, the hidden hand that keeps the truth from arriving. That is the Schmitt move — the friend-enemy apparatus presented as the nature of politics. He needs the agencies to be sinister so the party’s silence reads as fear rather than calculation, and the media to be hostile so the confession reads as brave. He is not predicting a catharsis. He is ordering one, with a production schedule and a villain already cast.
Early on, the authors pose a mystery: How can Donald Trump be so courtly to Joe Biden in person yet so abusive on the hustings? It’s no mystery. The authors don’t give the answer — kayfabe — because they’re participants in the kayfabe.
Kayfabe is the fakeness of professional wrestling. Recall Mr. Biden’s 2024 ABC interview after his debate debacle. This is what it looks like when kayfabe takes a day off. He didn’t say, for once, that Mr. Trump was a threat to democracy — because now it would undercut his own plea to stay in the race despite lousy polls.
Here is the load-bearing concept, and it is a laundering operation dressed as a literary insight. The technique is frame-engineered relabeling at the level of an entire category: import the word “kayfabe” from professional wrestling, and the category does the arguing without a single supporting fact. If politics is kayfabe, nobody means anything. If everybody is performing, nobody is responsible. If the press is “participating,” reporting is scripted drama rather than a record with consequences. That is Bandura’s distortion-of-consequences mechanism in a literary blazer: the harm becomes unreal because the genre has been declared unreal. Calling politics kayfabe is the oldest trick in the operator’s book — name the ring so no one asks who is bleeding. “Kayfabe takes a day off” is a vivid phrase and a hasty-generalization engine: from one convenience to the proposition that the whole political record is staged. That is what the word is for.
This is the master-move because every subsequent passage depends on it. The “no national journalist is really so stupid” passage operates only if the press is in kayfabe. The Maddow paycheck passage operates only if the press is in kayfabe. The closing-line cadence about “the spell Mr. Trump and his enemies have cast” operates only if the press is in kayfabe. The frame is the page’s standing exemption from substantive engagement with coverage it dislikes. It is the page’s standing permission to dismiss the documented record of any reporting critical of the page’s preferred political actors.
The frame is also doing cui bono work the column does not name. The reader who accepts the kayfabe frame accepts that press coverage of the page’s preferred political actors is, by definition, performance — which means the page is licensed to substitute its own framing for the press’s framing on every contested question. The kayfabe frame is the delegation move dressed as media criticism. The page is not critiquing the press for bias; the page is installing itself as the alternative to a press the page has defined as fake. The move is structurally the disinformation-frame-as-alignment-determined-membership pattern in the Bad-Faith Techniques Catalog, inverted: the same word used to delegitimize in-coalition coverage is not applied to out-of-coalition coverage the page wants to elevate.
Between every line of Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan’s huffing disapproval of Mr. Trump’s reckless ignorance and impulsivity is their delight in having him as a subject, a ticket to the bestseller list. Their most clunkingly dishonest passage? After the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt, they segue to Mr. Trump’s bone spurs to escape Vietnam, supposedly re-establishing his reputation for “the opposite” of “physical courage.”
I promise you: No national journalist is really so stupid — so historically, psychologically, sociologically stupid — as to imagine physical courage is what distinguished those who went to Vietnam from those who didn’t. This is purely a kayfabe assertion — to get Mr. Trump back in his baddie costume and their unsearching narrative back on track.
Grant the premise: the segue in the book may well be clumsy, and the bone-spurs transition right after the Butler shooting is fair game for legitimate criticism. Then watch the size of the conclusion Jenkins hangs on it. “No national journalist is really so stupid” — not this passage is ragged, but the profession is performing. That is hasty generalization from a sample of one, braced by poisoning the well: if every journalist is in on the kayfabe, no journalist can ever be believed, and the only paper left standing with the truth is the one telling you so. The motive-attribution does the same work — “their delight in having him as a subject, a ticket to the bestseller list.” Delight is asserted, not documented. Journalists who cover consequential figures are accused of profiting from their subjects, which is true of all journalists and therefore explains nothing; the profit-motive smear is a machine for dismissing testimony without reading it. The ad hominem rides in on the same sentence — Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan are “participants in the kayfabe,” which is motive-attribution asserted, not shown, against two reporters whose book the column is simultaneously raiding for material. Watch the ladder trick: the column borrows the book’s own observations — the courtly-versus-abusive split, the Biden interview — to build its argument, then burns the authors as performers and calls the smoke an insight. One clunky segue is not a genre’s confession. When a columnist needs the whole press to be stupid to make his point, he has stopped making an argument — he is dismissing the witnesses, so the testimony never has to be answered.
Disinformation-frame as alignment-determined-membership — Bad-Faith Techniques Catalog — operates here through the explicit assertion that no credentialed journalist could sincerely hold the position the page is about to relabel as kayfabe. The plain-English reading is plainer than the column allows: the page is asserting that a generation of national-security and military-affairs reporters knowingly deployed a category — physical courage as distinguished by Vietnam service — they understood to be false, in order to advance a narrative they wanted to advance. The page is asking the reader to take the assertion on trust. The reader is given no documented record of the journalists’ private beliefs, no leaked memo from the newsrooms in question, no focus-group debrief on the costume thesis. The reader is given “I promise you.” That is not a receipt. That is the column telling the reader the columnist has standing to declare what journalists really believe, and the reader’s job is to accept the declaration. Operators of this kind call that move the trust-me frame: tell the audience the columnist has private access to the out-group’s motives that the audience does not, and ask the audience to take the access on faith.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez refers to the “Overton window,” which decides when outré ideas may be discussed. But as important is the emperor’s-new-clothes effect, which determines when it’s personally advantageous to ignore plainly obvious realities.
The lacuna in the Haberman/Swan book is the lacuna in all such accounts. In 2016, Mr. Trump was the “outsider” and “disrupter” whom a surprising number of Obama voters would take a flyer on. By 2024, the Times would later admit, his enemies had metamorphosed him. He became the “righteous hero triumphing in the face of smear campaigns, relentless prosecutions and even an attempt on his life” — though it still took astonishing mismanagement of their own nomination by Democrats to return him to the White House.
This is the moral payload, and it is Bandura’s displacement of responsibility, applied wholesale. The acts belong to a passive man; the authorship belongs to his enemies. “His enemies had metamorphosed him.” He did not run as he ran; they made him. The strongest man in the room is a mannequin. The column needs him to be both — “reckless, ignorant and impulsive” in one paragraph, a puppet in the next — because the base needs the strongman and the morality tale needs the victim. The “relentless prosecutions” that metamorphosed him produced a 34-count felony conviction in New York and a civil fraud judgment; that is the documented record, and no metamorphosis changes what a jury and a court found. The “smear campaigns” is the apparatus’s frame, quoted here out of the Times’s mouth so the Times carries the ownership while the column carries the benefit. The one fact in the sentence that is simply real — the attempt on his life — is real; everything else is a plea bargain with the house account. And the emperor’s-new-clothes line is the flattery that wraps it: the reader who sees the “spell” is the only open-eyed citizen in the room. The obvious truth, in this telling, is the account the apparatus has sold for a decade. Insight and surrender, welded together, so you cannot take one without the other.
Take another kayfabe telltale. In a hundred lifetimes, Rachel Maddow might never stop to ask how it could benefit Mr. Trump for the Russians constantly to be calling attention (as she alleges) to their support for Mr. Trump. Her disincentive is channeled directly into her $25 million paycheck, which obviously isn’t awarded for accurate reporting and analysis.
Attribution of blame — Bandura’s eight mechanisms of moral disengagement — combined with ad hominem — Bad-Faith Techniques Catalog — operates here through the substitution of motive for argument. The column does not engage with any specific Maddow segment on the Russia-coverage question. The column does not cite a documented case where Maddow raised the cost-benefit question of Russian attention to Trump support and declined to engage. The column asserts the disincentive — the $25 million paycheck — as if the paycheck is the explanation, and asks the reader to accept the assertion as analysis. The subject she covered was documented by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own investigation of Russian interference, a bipartisan record produced under Republican chairmen, and by the special counsel’s indictments of the Internet Research Agency and the GRU. No paycheck size explains a documentary record; the record does.
The plain reading: a named journalist’s paycheck is offered as proof that her coverage is inauthentic. The page is asking the reader to discount the coverage because the journalist is paid. The cui bono is visible to anyone who has watched the page operate. The $25 million figure is offered as the disincentive; no parallel figure is offered for the columnist’s own compensation; no parallel accounting is offered for the institutional incentives operating on the editorial page’s preferred coverage of Trump. Run the source’s own logic in reverse: by its own thesis, the page’s advertiser base, subscriber demographics, and ownership structure operate on its coverage of Trump the same way the Maddow paycheck operates on hers. The page’s standard is not the disincentive itself; the page’s standard is whose disincentive the page audits. The asymmetric standard is the deficit double standard again, this time applied not to fiscal discipline but to motive-discipline.
Mr. Trump could only gawp while his enemies did these favors for him. Ditto any open-eyed citizen. Kayfabe’s derivation is uncertain but the term is strikingly similar in mouth feel to “coward,” a description repeatedly merited by the national press in the Trump era. But explain as you will the spell Mr. Trump and his enemies have cast over our politics. When a prominent Democrat finds the courage to step outside the spell, on that day America might regain hope of being able to elect a serious president for serious times.
Two moves in the final stretch, then the reveal of the whole play. First, the word-magic of the close: kayfabe is “strikingly similar in mouth feel” to coward, a description “repeatedly merited” by the national press. This is not etymology. It is a pun doing argumentative work — the press must be cowardly because the word for fake sounds a little like the word for afraid. And with that, the both-sides landing: “the spell Mr. Trump and his enemies have cast upon our politics.” Equal weights, one spell. After sixteen paragraphs of dismissing the witnesses, the column closes where this apparatus always closes: the strongman is merely the reaction to the media’s overreach, and the only courage left in American politics is the courage to agree with the editorial board member. That is the courage frame — the operator’s favorite delivery system. You build a bridge between what you want and what the target calls integrity, and the target walks across it believing they have crossed a Rubicon. It is a plank. The column has been holding it out since paragraph one.
Threat-inflation closer — WSJ Editorial Technique Catalogue §4.13 — combined with the “common sense” / “elite” rhetorical pivot — §4.10 — operates through the closing line’s juxtaposition of “serious president for serious times” with the implicit threat that no such president will be elected until a Democrat steps outside the kayfabe frame. The “serious” in “serious president for serious times” is doing the work the page wants it to do. A serious president, on the page’s preferred reading, is a president who disavows the post-2016 Democratic record in the page’s vocabulary, who treats press coverage critical of Trump as kayfabe, who governs on the editorial board’s policy premises. The closing line does not say so. The closing line does not have to. The vocabulary does the work.
The “courage to step outside the spell” phrase is the column’s largest admission, disguised as a flourish. The page is asking the next Democratic president to step outside the spell the page has named. The courage is the courage to agree with Holman Jenkins. The serious president for serious times is the president who governs on the editorial board’s terms.
So here is what the Jenkins column is, taken together. Not advice. Not analysis. A sham with a byline — the surrender speech Jenkins wrote for a party he does not advise, complete with stage directions, a three-day production schedule, and a starring role for the man who saw it coming. It is the master-delegitimization: tell the reader the press is performing outrage, perform the outrage yourself about the press, and call the gap kayfabe. Tell the reader that any coverage of Trump is a costume, then supply the costume yourself — the bone-spurs anecdote walked back into the column on cue. Tell the reader the press is unified in its spell, then issue the directive to the next Democratic candidate to break the spell by surrendering to your premises. The operation is to make every disagreement with the page a performance question rather than a substantive one. That is not kayfabe. That is rhetoric — the real kind, the kind the column is built to obscure.
And the kayfabe Jenkins misses, because he is inside it, is the pose of the outsider: an editorial board member at the paper that has spent a decade selling this account of the decade, writing as the open-eyed citizen above the spell, inviting the serious Democrat to recite the house account as a confession. The column names the ring — and sells tickets to it. Take his own word for it. Kayfabe is the fakeness the performers agree never to name, and when they do name it, the naming is part of the act. He has named it. Every performer in his piece is exposed — the book’s authors, the anchor, the press, the cowards — except the man holding the script. The mirror is the whole of it: the insider posing as the outsider, the operator posing as the fan, the man who wrote the confession lecturing the press about cowardice. That is the kayfabe he cannot see, because he is working it.
What Jenkins actually built, under the kayfabe frame, is a permission structure for a successor Democratic Party whose policy program is the WSJ editorial board’s policy program. The terms of surrender are written in this column. The catharsis Jenkins prescribes on day three is a catharsis to the page’s preferred positions, in the page’s preferred vocabulary, on the page’s preferred terms. A serious president for serious times does not need that speech. He needs to see the man holding the script.
The confession Jenkins wants Democrats to sign pays the outstanding invoice of his own apparatus — the media lied, the agencies conspired, the prosecutions were smears, and the only serious politics left is the politics of agreeing with the Journal. When a prominent Democrat reads that speech aloud, the con completes itself — the party confesses to the account, and the man who wrote the confession gets to applaud the courage. When a Democrat finds the courage to name that kayfabe, on that day America might regain hope of being able to elect a serious president for serious times. Jenkins wrote the line. He should not get to use it twice.
I helped build versions of this when I was running the same operation. The frame is the same. The vocabulary is the same. The surrender script is the same. Only the sign on the door has changed.