The outlet has become a one-stop shop for anyone struggling to navigate the first weeks of the new administration.
As Phil has observed, Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy — a multipronged pincer in which the president bombards the news cycle with executive orders, interviews, impromptu pressers, and social media posts that shape the national discourse — seems designed to disorient his opponents.
Some have responded to this campaign of extremely mild psychological warfare better than others. We need not look long for examples of those on the left who have unsuccessfully managed their own debilitating apprehension. Axios reporters have already submitted themselves.
“Political anxiety has been building for years,” the outlet conceded. “But President Trump’s pugnacious style and the breakneck series of changes he and Elon Musk unleashed has ratcheted everything up” to the point that some of Trump’s skeptics may require therapeutic intervention.
According to the mental health professionals with whom the outlet spoke, Trump’s reorientation of federal priorities augments the stresses associated with the ongoing wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, as though these pressure factors were of equal gravity. “We are in an unprecedented time that we have so many collective stressors going on, and the rapid fire of media coverage of these policy changes, it’s just adding to that broader collective stress,” said University of California, Irvine, “Coping Lab” researcher Daniel Relihan.
Optimally, those who suffer psychological discomfort as a result of reading the news would remedy that condition by declining to overinvest in political outcomes they cannot control. As Axios reported, “Research has shown the amount of stress connected to politics that people experience has been steadily rising since 2008.” That makes sense. It was right around then that Americans developed an unhealthy relationship with politics, in which voters stopped seeing politicians as representatives of their interests and started seeing them as representations of themselves.
But establishing a self-protective distance from politics was not what was recommended. Instead, the Coping Lab researcher suggested that the addled resolve to tune out the news. “This disengaging is a protective way to reduce stress for mental health, and ultimately to help reduce any impacts of that stress on your physical health,” Relihan told Axios. Fair enough. If the punch-drunk left is going to tune out anything, Axios should probably be first on the list.
Elsewhere in its pages on Monday, the outlet complained of a disturbing trend in which American Sign Language performers have been getting less and less screen time at the Super Bowl over the last two decades. Although almost no supporting context buttressed it, the outlet saw that observation as an opportunity to launch a scolding lecture on the Trump administration’s far more recent “attack” on “disability rights and visibility” as part of its anti-DEI initiatives. “Trump’s attacks on diversity policies could set back progress for people with disabilities, who already face obstacles in landing jobs,” the dispatch read.
The tenuous connections that purportedly link one issue to the other are obvious only among those who would benefit from the counseling this outlet provided its readers earlier. Maddening though its approach may be, we can’t gainsay Axios’s business model. The venue has become a one-stop shop for anyone struggling to navigate the first weeks of the second Trump administration — the cause of and remedy to the left’s performative Trump-induced agitation.