Two months ago, I reposted a statement from Donald Trump into a WhatsApp group chat after one of the flare-ups involving Iran. I remember the statement clearly because of how strange it sounded in the moment. Very early on, Trump declared: “We won.” I was taking the statement literally, or at least seriously enough to discuss its implications. The reaction I received was unexpectedly revealing: several people responded as though I were being intentionally obtuse.

The assumption seemed to be that I could not possibly be reading Trump’s words straightforwardly. The “correct” interpretive framework, at least within that social environment, was to understand the statement performatively rather than literally. Trump was expressing emotion, posture, morale, dominance, vibes. Parsing the words themselves too carefully was treated almost like a category error.

Two months later, I found myself arguing with a friend about the decline of American political culture. The more revealing moment came when he invoked Joe Biden as an example of an older, more decent political culture. I brought up Biden’s 2012 statement accusing Mitt Romney of wanting to “put y’all back in chains.”

For him, the statement was contextual, rhetorical, explainable. For me, even years later, it still feels wildly outside acceptable political boundaries. Not because it was the single worst thing ever said in American politics, but because it reflected a normalization of moral escalation and tribal demonization that many people in my generation experienced directly.

What struck me afterward was not merely the disagreement itself, but the realization that we were operating from entirely different media histories.

For older liberals, the story of American political deterioration often begins with talk radio, Fox News, and the weaponization of outrage by the political right. For many younger conservatives or politically heterodox millennials, the formative memory was different: irony-soaked........

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