Politics & Power Quote by Jeff Gannon

It lands like a polite question and hits like an accusation. By addressing “Mr. President,” Jeff Gannon frames himself as a proxy for the public, invoking the ritual deference of a press conference while sneaking in a loaded premise: that “people” (read: opponents, critics, inconvenient experts) aren’t merely wrong, they’ve “divorced themselves from reality.” The verb is the tell. Divorce isn’t a disagreement; it’s a moral and psychological break, a willful abandonment. The line smuggles pathology into politics.

The intent is less to solicit strategy than to offer validation. It hands the president an opening to dismiss dissent without wrestling with its claims. If your adversaries are irrational by definition, compromise becomes not just unnecessary but irresponsible. That’s the subtext: govern as if the other side isn’t an alternate constituency but a malfunction.

Context matters because the question performs a particular kind of journalism: access-seeking, narrative-friendly, built for a clean soundbite. It casts the president as the adult in the room, surrounded by deluded actors, and invites a response that reads as leadership even if it’s just contempt with a steady tone. The brilliance, if you can call it that, is its plausible deniability. It can be defended as concern about polarization while functioning as a framing device that hardens it.

It also foreshadows a media era where “reality” becomes a partisan possession. The question doesn’t just describe division; it helps manufacture the terms of it.