Here I connect politics and entertainment.

I have been watching a nine-part Netflix series Detective Hole, from Norway. It is story-craft at its best—it upsets me the way life upsets me. The twelve-year-old son of his girlfriend arranges to meet him in a bar; the boy has a very disappointing moment with him. I am thinking: “Why did you treat him that way? Grow up, you Asshole!” A few minutes later, I think back on that moment and conclude, yes, that is a moment from life—life as-it-is-lived.

Another moment goes like this: A chief detective has told an assistant to get away from the window in a potential perp’s home and stay in the kitchen with the mother. It is a perfectly normal expression of concern, but it serves the psychopath’s aim. He will go meet the perp at the door, with his assistant out of the way. However; she gets on the phone with a colleague she feels closer to and expresses her concern. She whispers, “What the hell is going on?” Then, she breaks with the warning to stay in the kitchen; she goes down the stairs and meets the detective who is holding the perp with a drawn gun—he has come home to visit his mother. The detective has said loudly, “Drop your weapon!” She stands on the stairs, just above the entry door with her weapon drawn and observes to the chief detective out loud, “He is unarmed.” We, the viewers, at that moment, think this about the chief detective: “Whoops, you didn’t think that one through, did you?” But then the chief detective holds up a pistol in his left hand and says, “I already disarmed him!” The scene shakily holds, awkward timing and all, to the chief detective’s line. The weapon in his left hand is connected to recent crimes and adds to the power of seeming truth-telling. He had already planned to kill the perp and plant that gun, until his assistant ruined the moment.

There is more to the scene than that (the actual connection between the perp and the chief detective), but I will leave it there. I have watched seven of nine episodes. I have never seen a more realistic representation of a psychopath than in this series. There are flawed, good people—very flawed—pretty good—people who have one thing in mind: outplaying the psychopath.

Politics. When we complete Donald Trump’s jokes for him, he wins. We talk endlessly about the absurd things he says and does every day. When you do this, you take his lead and run with it. That is what losers do. Almost everyone in the media does this. Foreign leaders do it.

It never stops. It never stops. OUTPLAY him. OUTPLAY him.