Jenkins runs the WSJ’s long con: Trump’s own agencies’ enforcement as proof of his decline. I built versions of this move from a different editorial page in a different decade. The focus-group instrument I retained from that period carried a forced-choice question between “regulatory overreach” and “enforcement priorities,” with the desired-answer key indexed to the political valence of the operator in office. The vocabulary Jenkins is using here is the vocabulary I helped deploy.
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. used his Wednesday “Business World” column in The Wall Street Journal (August 22, 2026 print edition; published online August 21, 2026) to perform the operation: he took the Trump-era deployment of FCC threats, SEC inquiries, and US attorney pressure against the administration’s perceived adversaries, and ran it through a “normal-government” frame so the reader would absorb the conclusion — these agencies are now behaving normally, and the credit (or blame) belongs to Trump’s declining approval — before any of the underlying enforcement record had been named. The piece deploys two examples to make the frame stick: Disney’s lawsuit against FCC pressure over Jimmy Kimmel, and the Lakers sale by Mark Walter under SEC/US-attorney inquiry. Both examples are real. Both are also the very mechanisms the WSJ editorial board would have called political when a Democratic administration ran them. The piece works because the frame is loaded before the evidence is examined. This column walks through the piece as it appears.
The headline performs the frame move before the body does. “The Lakers Are Up, Trump Is Down” — the title presents two unrelated conditions (a team-sale price move and a presidential approval move) as commensurable movements joined by the word “and,” with the parallel construction itself doing the analytical work. The Lakers are “up” because the column will shortly assert they are selling at a $2.5 billion premium; Trump is “down” because the column will shortly assert his approval has fallen. The headline’s syntax tells the reader the two are happening at once, that they are happening for related reasons, and that the related reason is what the column will explain. The title is the lede, in compressed form; the body is the lede unpacked.
You heard it here first. Donald Trump’s lame-duckery is picking up speed. As it does, his government will start acting like a normal government. This might even benefit Mr. Trump’s reputation in the final two years of his presidency.
— Jenkins, “The Lakers Are Up, Trump Is Down,” WSJ, August 22, 2026, paragraph 1
Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ §4.1, Luntz 2002 — operates here through two substitutions stacked on top of each other. The first: “lame-duckery” recasts declining presidential power as a positive development. The word is a euphemism for a structural condition — the president has lost the political ground that lets him run the government the way he has been running it — and Jenkins is using the euphemism to make that condition feel benign. The second: “normal government” recasts whatever the page’s preferred institutional actors do without political interference as “normal.” Both substitutions move the reader’s frame before any policy substance has been named.
The “this might even benefit Mr. Trump’s reputation” hedge in the same paragraph does the bipartisan-cover work. It lets Jenkins pose as analytical — he is saying the lame-duck status might help Trump! — while feeding the decline narrative. The hedge is the page’s preferred posture: the appearance of even-handedness attached to a one-directional thesis. The gerund “lame-duckery” turns the constitutional category into a process the president is sliding into, so the reader tracks “Trump fading” without being asked to notice that the agencies named in the next paragraph are the president’s own.
The operator’s-eye-view binds these substitutions to a structural ground the column will not name. “Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have gone down” is the surface variable Jenkins is willing to assert; the structural ground — the Iran bungle, the polling that underwrites the approval move, the down-ballot indicators accumulated to date — is what forced the pivot. Jenkins names approval because approval is the relabel that turns a structural shift into a personal-morale story. The reader is invited to feel that the agencies are behaving normally because Trump has decided to behave. The reader is not invited to feel that the agencies were behaving politically because the political ground made the political behavior possible. That is the cover.
The multiple-audience-targeting move (WSJ §4.3) operates at the lede on two axes. The geographic axis: “expect it to spread east” addresses the financial-class readership the column is written for with the message that the business elite is decoupling from Trump; the populist conservative base reached via syndication receives the same words as a verdict that Trump is fading. The sector axis: “the industry most sensitive to personal prestige — Hollywood — recognized it first” positions entertainment as the leading indicator whose judgment the financial-class reader trusts on prestige matters. Same words to both audiences; the column does not need to choose between them.
One example: A year ago we were talking about entertainment giants and their news divisions rolling over for Mr. Trump, paying off his lawsuits, canceling his late-night critics. Now Disney is sticking up for its ABC broadcast network in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s intimidation tactics.
No, Disney’s courage didn’t go up. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have gone down. So has his personal prestige amid the Iran bungle. Perhaps not surprising, this recognition begins with business elites 3,000 miles away from Washington. Expect it to spread east.
— paragraphs 2 and 4
The inversion move runs across these two paragraphs. Jenkins’ argument is that Disney’s previous compliance with Trump FCC intimidation — the Kimmel pullback, the Paramount settlement, the Colbert cancellation, the pattern of last year — was not cowardice, just prudence in the face of power. Now that the power is waning, Disney is fighting back. The structural message: businesses comply with government when the government is strong; the businesses are not being captured, they are being rational. Compliance with power is recast as rational response, not moral failure. The FCC threats that drove the Kimmel pullback earlier this year — Brendan Carr’s “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” comments on the public record, the early license reviews of all eight ABC-owned stations the FCC ordered in April before they were set to expire, the Disney complaint itself — get recast as a function of Trump’s prestige rather than as a feature of executive power the editorial page should be opposing on principle.
The third-graf turn (WSJ §3.3 signature move) lands at “Disney is sticking up for its ABC broadcast network in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s intimidation tactics.” Two paragraphs of case-establishment, then a generalization — “this recognition begins with business elites 3,000 miles away from Washington” — that names Hollywood as the leading indicator. A scanner who reads three grafs has consumed the frame.
The coordinated_message_discipline (Bad-Faith Catalog) starts to surface here in its diagnostic form. The piece calls Walter a “private equity kingpin” — flattering for the preferred actor. It calls Brendan Carr “Trump’s servile FCC chief” — loaded for the disfavored actor. It calls the same agency’s behavior in the Disney example “intimidation tactics” and in the Lakers example a “deal” the agency had “a role in prompting.” The vocabulary shifts to fit the political valence of who is being described.
A second example: This week saw private equity kingpin Mark Walter selling his iconic Los Angeles Lakers under pressure from two Trump agencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, over accounting questions.
The deal represents one of the biggest Hollywood-centric business and finance stories of the year. Mr. Trump has been uncharacteristically silent.
Once he might have tweeted that he deserved a commission given the government’s role in prompting the sale. Even more because the lead buyer is a person whose relationship to Mr. Trump has a specific term in Turkish, Chinese and a few other languages, but not English. Joshua Kushner is the brother of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.
The deal further intersects with an important Trump interest. Through his servile FCC chief, Brendan Carr, Mr. Trump’s administration has been leaning on sports leagues and team owners to keep their games on traditional TV. Why? Because the ad revenues prop up the cable news channels, pro and con, that devote 24 hours a day to Mr. Trump’s doings. (This is one cause Democrats share, a rare instance of bipartisanship.)
— paragraphs 6–7
The “specific term in Turkish, Chinese and a few other languages, but not English” line is the column’s most naked class-signaling moment, and the linguistic premise it stands on is shakier than Jenkins lets on. English has single-word kinship terms — sister-in-law, mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law. What English lacks is a single word for the brother of one’s son-in-law specifically, which is a feature of English’s compound-term preference, not a marker of cultural innocence. The Turkish-and-Chinese claim is also contestable: both languages typically use compound constructions for that specific relation, with single-word kinship terms reserved for closer and more frequently used configurations. Jenkins isn’t making a linguistic observation. He is smuggling an insinuation under linguistic cover — that English-speaking cultures fail to recognize the family-of-power relationships other cultures name — and the column’s readers are expected to receive the insinuation without examining the linguistic premise it rests on. The implied register is “see, the Kushner relationship is something those cultures have a word for.” The line is a coded snide dressed as a linguistic observation, and it does the work of making the family relationship of presidential power the story rather than the policy substance of the agencies’ actions.
The “Once he might have tweeted that he deserved a commission” line is the modal-softening move (Bad-Faith Catalog: hedge via counterfactual). Trump’s history of demanding credit for deals his administration has touched is on the public record many times over. The “might have” recasts a documented pattern as a counterfactual possibility, which lets Jenkins appear to be observing from outside the pattern while participating in the pattern of letting the president off the hook for past conduct the editorial page is now declining to enumerate.
The bipartisanship-launder runs through the parenthetical. Jenkins calls Brendan Carr “servile” to Trump, which is a soft indictment of FCC leadership. But the column’s analytical work in the same paragraph is to recast the FCC’s pro-cable-TV policy as a “cause Democrats share” — the parenthetical “(This is one cause Democrats share, a rare instance of bipartisanship.)” does the work. The piece says: Democrats also benefit from cable news being solvent, so the FCC’s pressure on sports leagues to keep games on traditional TV is bipartisan. The bipartisanship framing lets the WSJ’s long-standing institutional preference — limit FCC interference — cohabit with the column’s Trump-decline narrative. The Fairness Doctrine editorial campaigns through the 1980s and the 2017 net-neutrality reversal coverage are the documented libertarian editorial-page episodes the bipartisanship frame is currently laundered through; the broader institutional posture of the page is on the public record. The “servile” label on Carr does the work of indicting Trump without indicting the policy; the bipartisanship parenthetical does the work of defending the policy by removing it from Trump.
The euphemism-cluster move (WSJ §4.12) operates on the unnamed kinship term. The relationship Jenkins will not name is the one his readers are invited to find titillating — the brother-in-law of the president’s son-in-law buying a team from a PE operator under SEC pressure, with a “very liberal partner in the deal, former Disney chief Bob Iger” (a sentence Jenkins saves for the next graf, in case the reader missed the bipartisan-coalition frame). The euphemism’s structural function is to reclassify the relationship from load-bearing context to titillating background — by inviting the reader to find the unnamed kinship titillating rather than constitutive, the column preserves Trump’s silence as the news while the relationship becomes the unstated explanation, which is what allows the “good-government” frame to operate unexamined. The euphemism is doing the work the column will not do.
The asymmetric-source-citation pattern (WSJ §3.6) operates in reverse. When the agency’s behavior is being defended, the agency is described as acting on “accounting questions” with no further characterization. When the agency’s behavior is being critiqued, the agency is described as deploying “intimidation tactics” with the loaded noun up front. The reader is being taught which agency behavior counts as legitimate enforcement and which counts as political pressure, by the diction alone.
Which makes all the more striking that nothing fishy seems to be going on in the enforcement actions against Mr. Walter, which prompted the Lakers sale. The inquiry reportedly concerns certain loans from which the fund manager benefited that ended up on the books of insurance companies he controls. This is a traditional good-government consideration. You would expect it from any administration.
— paragraph 9
The no_true_scotsman move (Bad-Faith Catalog; Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking, 1975) operates here in its cleanest form. “Nothing fishy seems to be going on in the enforcement actions” — Jenkins’s basis for this conclusion is the SEC and US attorney’s choice of target (Mark Walter, not a Trump critic) and the absence of public Trump commentary about the sale. The column redefines what counts as “fishy” by reference to the political valence of the target, not by reference to the enforcement record.
The pre-emptive normalization move runs parallel. Jenkins says “seems” and “nothing fishy” and then offers no evidence — he accepts the enforcement action’s legitimacy on the SEC and SDNY’s say-so. This is structurally identical to the way the WSJ editorial board has historically treated SEC enforcement actions against hedge funds and other financial-sector players as legitimate when they fit the editorial’s “good government” preferences, and as politicized “lawfare” when they do not. The asymmetry is the technique (Bad-Faith Catalog: goalpost-shifting; WSJ §4.4 deficit double standard variant applied to enforcement).
“This is a traditional good-government consideration. You would expect it from any administration.” This sentence is the load-bearing frame of the entire column. It is doing three things at once. First, it characterizes the enforcement action as “traditional” — i.e., the kind of action any administration would take, which is the same euphemism Jenkins has used across the WSJ catalogue for enforcement actions the page wants to defend. Second, it characterizes the action as “good-government consideration” — the page’s preferred euphemism for enforcement that the page has previously called political when a Democratic administration did it. Third, the sentence closes the analytical move the column opened with: having attributed the change to “Trump’s approval ratings have gone down,” the column now asks the reader to treat the enforcement action that prompted the change as ordinary governance. The enforcement action is the column’s proof that normalization has occurred. The reader is invited to accept the proof without examining whether the action is the kind of action the page would have called political under different conditions.
The frame_engineered_relabeling here is operating on a category boundary. The page’s catalogue reserves “intimidation tactics” for enforcement that touches the page’s preferred institutions (Disney, ABC, broadcast licenses) and reserves “good-government consideration” for enforcement that touches institutions the page is less invested in (a PE firm controlled by an insurance-company structure). The categories are defined by the political valence of the target, not by the structural features of the enforcement. That is the con.
Not only did they rush overnight into a high-dollar transaction — Mr. Walter bought the team a year ago for $10 billion. Now he’s selling it for $12.5 billion.
Last year, in an industry that commands as much attention as the sports and entertainment complex, it was impossible to make a move without triggering Mr. Trump and his FCC’s habit of never missing a chance to meddle in an attention-getting transaction and leverage it somehow for the president’s personal interests.
Yet Messrs. Iger and Kushner, who couldn’t possibly have lined up financing in advance, indicate no insecurity about whether other politically sensitive moguls will step up.
In fact, in the hoo-hah over the Lakers, titillating to the media on both coasts, Mr. Trump has been a non-factor. He’s had nothing to say about the blowup in the Buss family, L.A. royalty who built the Laker dynasty and are divided over whether to part with their minority stake. He’s been silent amid rampant speculation that Mr. Walter will also sell the Dodgers as the team steamrolls to a possible third consecutive World Series triumph.
It’s all here yet Mr. Trump’s instinct to insert himself has gone into abeyance.
— paragraphs 10–15
The coordinated_message_discipline continues. “Meddle” is the loaded verb for the FCC’s pressure on sports leagues in the previous graf and is the same word the column now uses to characterize what Trump “has been uncharacteristically silent” about. The page’s catalogue treats “meddle” as the appropriate verb for government intervention in transactions the page disfavors, and treats the absence of intervention as proof of normal governance when the page favors the transaction. The reader is invited to feel that the FCC’s prior pressure was “meddling” and that the FCC’s current restraint is “normal.” The reader is not invited to examine whether the agency was previously directed to pressure or has now been directed to stand down, or whether the agency’s posture is independent of either direction.
The “impossible to make a move without triggering Mr. Trump and his FCC” construction is the availability_cascade move (Bandura’s diffusion_of_responsibility adjacent) — the piece names the prior behavior as ubiquitous (“impossible to make a move without triggering”) and the current behavior as anomalous (“non-factor,” “abeyance”). The ubiquity claim is the column’s evidence that the prior behavior was structural; the anomaly claim is the column’s evidence that the current behavior is normal. Both claims rest on Jenkins’s reporting, not on the documentary record of agency behavior.
The $10 billion to $12.5 billion price move is the column’s other piece of evidence for the “hoo-hah” framing. Jenkins does not engage the question of whether the price move reflects the underlying value of the asset or reflects the political pressure that prompted the sale. The piece is uninterested in the price as a piece of evidence about the structural forces at work. The price is uninterested-as-data because the price would complicate the normalization thesis.
Read the other way, the price move is the column’s strongest evidence for the normalization thesis Jenkins is selling, not against it. A $2.5 billion differential on a forced sale, completed overnight, between operators with the standing to absorb political risk that other bidders could not, prices in the buyer’s expectation of post-deal agency posture — that is, prices in the very normalization the column is asserting. The market’s read of the deal is the market’s read of the regulatory environment. Jenkins declines to engage that read because engaging it would confirm the thesis the column wants to deploy while complicating the mechanism by which the column deploys it. That is the dodge.
File it under the dog that didn’t bark. Is Mr. Trump sensing how much Iran has punctured his mystique? Maybe he’s worried he’ll tweet something and no one will care? Whatever the cause, it’s no coincidence that the industry most sensitive to personal prestige — Hollywood — recognized it first. Call it a down payment on what the world will feel like — less colorful but also less grating — when Mr. Trump is no longer president.
— closing paragraph
The threat_inflation_closer (WSJ §4.13) operates here in its diagnostic form. The piece closes by inflating the stakes from concrete-to-civilizational. The closing line — “down payment on what the world will feel like — less colorful but also less grating — when Mr. Trump is no longer president” — is the closing-line cadence the catalogue documents as designed for retransmission. The cadence invites the scanner to lift the sentence and forward it as the take-home. The cadence also does analytical work: it frames the post-Trump future as the cost of Trump’s departure, with the “less colorful but also less grating” construction supplying both halves of the bargain (the reader gets to feel that something is lost and that something is gained) without engaging the question of which half is more accurate.
The “less colorful but also less grating” is the polite-condescension move. Jenkins is letting the reader feel that Trump’s presidency was colorful (which is true) and grating (which is also true) without naming what Trump was doing that was grating. The substantive dimensions of the administration’s actions — the immigration enforcement, the agency politicization, the press-freedom confrontations, the prosecutions of political opponents — are all absent from the column’s analytical frame. The column’s analytical frame is “personality,” not “policy,” and the editorial-page’s habit of reducing presidential power to personality is the register the column is operating in throughout. Personality is the editorial board’s preferred register for executive power: easier to read, easier to move on, easier to brand as “normal” or “abnormal” by editorial preference.
The “dog that didn’t bark” allusion is the page’s preferred register marker for this kind of argument — the Sherlock Holmes reference supplies the analytical authority that the column itself has not earned. The reference lets Jenkins name the absence of Trump’s commentary as the key piece of evidence. The reference does not engage the structural question of why the agencies were previously directing pressure on transactions and are now standing down — the question of whether the agency posture reflects a directive, an internal agency judgment, or a coincidence. The silence is being read as the trend reversal; the post-Kimmel pattern is being read as the prior pattern. The reference is converting absence into evidence and calling the conversion analysis.
The closing deploys frame_engineered_relabeling for the last time. “Less colorful but also less grating” recasts the post-Trump future as both a loss and a relief — the reader is invited to feel both at once. The relabel invites the reader to accept the column’s normalization thesis as a complex truth rather than as a one-sided frame. The relabel does not name what the agencies were doing during the colorful-and-grating period, what the documentary record on the agencies’ enforcement priorities shows, or what the agencies’ posture will be after Trump’s departure. The relabel is doing the work the analysis did not.
So here is what the column actually amounts to, taken together.
Jenkins has spent the column asking the reader to feel that the agencies are now behaving normally because Trump’s approval has fallen. The proof of normal behavior is the Lakers sale, which Jenkins calls “traditional good-government consideration” by the SEC and a US attorney, and which Jenkins attributes to the absence of Trump’s commentary about it. The reader is invited to accept the proof without examining whether the agencies’ posture is independent of either direction. The reader is not invited to notice that the same agencies, doing the same kind of work, against different targets, in different political conditions, would have been called political by the same editorial page — because the column’s whole operation depends on the reader not noticing.
The “lame-duckery” label is the polite term for a frame the WSJ editorial page has been running at least since William H. Grimes wrote in 1951 that “On our editorial page we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road. Our comments and interpretations are made from a definite point of view” — seventy-five years of institutional voice committed to a definite point of view, the recasting of executive-branch action as either “normal” or “abnormal” depending on whether the action aligns with the page’s preferences. The label changes with the target. The institutional commitment does not.
The vocabulary the page uses for agency behavior depends on who sits in the Oval Office and who is being touched. When the operator in office is a Republican and the target is a PE firm selling a basketball team, the page calls it good government. When the operator in office is a Democrat and the target is a Disney broadcast license, the page calls it intimidation. The vocabulary is not a description; it is a permission structure. The reader who absorbs it has been told which enforcement actions to accept and which to resist, by reference to who is being touched, not by reference to what the agencies are doing.
The “Lakers Are Up, Trump Is Down” headline inverts the editorial’s own logic onto the page. The board’s preferred normal is not what the country is getting back to; the page is delivering its preferred normal by branding what it wants as “normal” and what it does not as “lame-duckery.” The piece is the editorial preference dressed as the country getting back to itself.
— Phukher Tarlson