Politics & Power Quote by Fred F. Fielding

Fielding’s line reads like a lawyerly diagnosis of a sick civic climate, but it’s also a strategic reframing. By locating today’s rage in “the last eight years,” he quietly stakes out a partisan timeline without naming names. That vagueness is the tell: it invites listeners to fill in the culprit themselves while he maintains the posture of a neutral professional calling balls and strikes.

The phrasing is built to sound clinical. “Deep-seated hostility” and “take political decisions very personally” translate raw anger into something like a case file: a problem of temperament, not necessarily of policy or power. That matters because it shifts responsibility away from institutions and leaders and toward ordinary citizens’ emotional overinvestment. It’s an implicit scold, softened by its generality.

Then comes the most revealing move: “a constant, ongoing attack.” Attack by whom, using what tools, over which stakes? The sentence blurs the difference between criticism, accountability, and actual harassment. In a media ecosystem where “maligned” is often a synonym for “challenged,” this language can launder grievance into something principled: not “we’re being investigated” but “we’re being attacked.”

Contextually, Fielding is a veteran Republican attorney and institutional operator, someone whose credibility trades on steadiness. The intent isn’t to dissect specific events; it’s to legitimize a sense of siege while sounding above the fray. By casting polarization as symmetrical (“one side or the other”), he offers a soothing equilibrium that can feel fair-minded, even as it sidesteps asymmetries in who holds power, who sets narratives, and who benefits when politics gets reduced to personal insult.