A columnist attacking Trump's North Korea diplomacy omitted his own past praise of the exact same approach, while Senate Democrats quietly handed Trump tariff authority they spent years fighting — and the establishment press barely blinked.

When the people framing the debate leave out the facts that complicate their story, working Americans are the ones kept in the dark. These two episodes — one from a local opinion column, one from the Senate floor — show the same rigged game from different angles.

Gary Horton's Aug. 19 column in The Signal, "Palling Around with Terrorists — for Real," presents Trump's relationship with Kim Jong Un in the darkest possible light while leaving out several inconvenient facts. As Arthur Tom documented in The Signal, Horton himself wrote in 2018 that Trump was "very correct to open channels with North Korea and build peace." Kim was already a dictator then. North Korea was already nuclear-armed and on the state-sponsor-of-terrorism list. Horton understood the personal relationship was a diplomatic tool — until it became politically useful to call it something sinister.

Horton also omits that Barack Obama met Raúl Castro in 2015 while Cuba was still designated a state sponsor of terrorism. Diplomacy with adversaries wasn't sinister when Obama did it. It only becomes sinister when Trump does it.

The omissions go deeper. Horton treats Trump's talk of good personal relationships as proof he's a pushover, but the record says otherwise. Trump ordered major strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen in 2025 and later struck Iranian nuclear facilities. Argentine President Javier Milei is a Trump ally, but Argentina still faced Trump's tariff policies. His administration brokered the Abraham Accords. At the 2025 NATO summit, allies committed to spending 5% of GDP on defense after years of Trump pressing them. None of this makes Horton's column.

Meanwhile, on the Senate floor, Democrats performed their own selective routine. After years of railing against Trump's tariffs, nearly the entire Democratic caucus voted to give him limited tariff authority — baked into a Russia sanctions package. The authority allows tariffs up to 500% on Russian imports and 100% on the top five countries buying Russian energy. Only nine Democrats and Rand Paul voted no.

Sen. Ron Wyden warned on the floor that the vote "gives Donald Trump massive new tariff authority that he can use to threaten our trading partners and raise prices on the American people." Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Trump "has shown what he will do with broad tariff authority." Both voted against — but their caucus handed the power over anyway.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who pushed the package for nearly two years alongside the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, told Fox News Digital that if Trump exceeds the legal limits, courts will block him. Rand Paul offered the clearest warning: "Do not let sympathy for Ukraine blind you to the reality of tariffs." Another tax on the American people, dressed up as moral urgency.

A columnist who praised Trump's Korea diplomacy in 2018 now calls it "palling around with terrorists." A party that spent years fighting tariff authority just voted to give Trump more of it. The facts haven't changed. The framing has. That's the game — and working Americans are the ones being played.