Politics & Power Quote by Nicholas D. Kristof

There is a quiet rebuke hiding inside Kristof's seemingly mild sentence. The line doesn’t defend Republicans or “the president” so much as it indicts the speaker’s own side for choosing the low-effort satisfactions of outrage. “It’s easy” is doing the heavy lifting: Kristof frames blame as the path of least resistance, the political equivalent of doomscrolling - emotionally fluent, morally gratifying, strategically sterile.

The construction is also carefully bipartisan in its target list. By pairing “Republicans” with “the president,” he signals that scapegoating is a habit that can be aimed at an opposition party or a single executive figure, depending on the news cycle. That slight vagueness makes the quote portable: it can be dropped into almost any moment when a coalition would rather narrate its powerlessness than confront its own leverage. In Kristof’s columnist mode, the sentence reads like the first step in a pivot: from complaint to prescription, from analysis that assigns guilt to analysis that assigns agency.

Contextually, Kristof has long operated as a moral entrepreneur within mainstream liberal media, pressing readers toward pragmatic interventions - anti-poverty policy, public health, human rights - rather than settling for righteous distance. The subtext is: blame is not the same as responsibility. You can be correct about who caused the mess and still be complicit in letting it persist, because correctness feels like work while actual coalition-building, persuasion, and policy tradeoffs are work. The line’s intent is to shame the comfortable posture of spectatorship and to demand a harder question: what are you going to do besides be right?