Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline

We’ve seen this act before: a local editor mistakes his own Trump derangement for insight, then calls the rest of us crazy for noticing.

LUTHMANN NOTE: Brian Laline thinks he caught Trump slipping. He didn’t. He walked straight into the same trap the media has fallen into for ten years. Trump throws out a ridiculous image, and instead of calling it what it is—trolling—they escalate it into a psychological diagnosis. That’s not journalism. That’s compulsion. Laline’s column proves the point better than any critic could. He’s not analyzing Trump anymore. He’s reacting to him. And that’s the real story. The outrage machine doesn’t just run on Trump—it runs on people like Laline who can’t stop feeding it. This piece is “Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline.”

By Richard Luthmann

Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline: He is not sounding the alarm. He is performing one.

(STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK) – I read Brian Laline’s latest piece. Then I read it again. I wanted to be fair. I wanted to see whether there was some hidden core of sober judgment beneath the panting hysteria. There wasn’t. What I found was a Staten Island editor so consumed by Trump that he now mistakes provocation for pathology and his own revulsion for diagnosis.

Laline says he thought he “finally had him on the ropes.”

That line gives the whole game away. He is not analyzing a president. He is rooting for a knockout. He is not reporting. He is shadowboxing with the man in his own head.

The target is Trump, but the obsession belongs to Laline. That is why the column reads less like a measured civic warning and more like a frustrated confession from a man enraged that his old anti-Trump talking points no longer move anyone.

The specific trigger was Trump’s AI-generated image depicting himself in a Christ-like healing scene. Trump did post it. It drew backlash. He later said he thought it showed him “as a doctor” and added, “I make people a lot better.” Reuters reported that clearly, and so did other outlets.

But Laline does not stop at calling the image ridiculous, vain, stupid, or offensive. Those are fair shots. He leaps straight to “serious mental decline,” “mental incapacity,” and “insanity.”

That is the tell. Laline is not reacting to one image. He is using one image as an excuse to revive a fantasy he has been nursing for years: that Trump is uniquely unwell, uniquely irrational, uniquely unfit, and that the rest of America is too blind to see it unless Brian Laline finally shouts loud enough. That is not clarity. That is compulsion.

Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline: Orwell got the larger point right. Laline proves it by example.

George Orwell identified Laline’s transparent rhetoric decades ago in “Two Minutes Hate,” from 1984, where a regime channels public feeling toward a designated enemy to keep the crowd obedient, emotional, and intellectually lazy.

Sound familiar?

Recently, Michael Smith’s “America’s Two Minutes Hate” described the specific pattern at play. The people who rushed online to announce some grand moral break with Trump over this image “got played,” and the outrage cycle looked less like moral seriousness than a ritualized emotional release.

Laline invites collective “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” elevating the President to the level of Emmanuel Goldstein in the Orwellian sense. On the core point, Smith is right, and Laline is Exhibit A. Laline’s column is not a reasoned critique of conduct. It is a public struggle session. It is a declaration that any normal person must now agree that Trump has “gone off the rails.” It is written to force assent, not invite thought.

Look at how Laline structures the piece. He stages a running dialogue with “Pat,” his reasonable Trump-supporting foil. He sprinkles in hostile subscriber emails. He invokes older Trump controversies. He escalates from blasphemy to civilization-ending threats to bleach to insanity.

This is not an argument by evidence. It is an argument by accumulation. He wants the reader emotionally spent by the end, so the conclusion feels inevitable. Trump must be nuts. Anyone who disagrees must be in denial.

That is exactly why the Orwellian point matters. The outrage machine does not depend on every critic being wrong about every fact. It depends on critics like Laline taking every Trump provocation as proof of the same foregone diagnosis.

Trump trolls. Laline convulses. The media class nods along. Then they call it insight.

It is not insight. It is muscle memory, and when combined with TDS, it is 100% effective at collapsing the faculty of reason.

Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline: He wants to sound brave. What he really sounds like is trapped.

I am not here to defend the image. It was gaudy. It was juvenile. It was bait. Trump has made a career out of baiting people who cannot resist taking the hook. That much is obvious.

Personally, here is the picture I wish Trump would post, celebrating the American Pope (a “playful troll” would go much further, hitting the “Chicago” subject matter, and there’s plenty of it—BELIEVE ME!):

What I reject is Laline’s smug insistence that the only serious reading is his reading. That is cheap. That is lazy. And from a veteran editor, it is embarrassing.

Laline writes that this is “no longer a Democrat or Republican thing.” That line is laughable. The whole column is one long partisan therapy session masquerading as civic concern. He even tells readers that “any Democrat really watching knew Biden was in serious decline,” but then says Biden might have had dementia while Trump is flirting with “insanity.” That is not balanced. That is a man trying to launder one narrative through a token concession to another.

Here is what I think is actually going on. Laline cannot stand that Trump still controls attention. He cannot stand that every vulgar image, every troll post, every absurd flourish still sends the anti-Trump class into a frenzy while much of the country shrugs and moves on. So he keeps raising the stakes. Bad judgment becomes incapacity. Vanity becomes madness. Performance becomes pathology. It is the language of a columnist who has exhausted persuasion and now substitutes alarm.

That is why I say: don’t get fooled by Brian Laline. He wants readers to believe he is the adult in the room. He isn’t. He is the latest victim of the same Trump obsession that has warped elite commentary for a decade. He sees one stupid AI image and decides he has discovered the Rosetta Stone of presidential psychosis.

No. He has discovered only his own limits.

Trump knew people like Laline would react this way. Orwell told us they would react this way. I knew they would react this way. And then they did.

That is not proof that Trump is insane. It is proof that Brian Laline is still playing a part in a script he did not write and can no longer escape.