During the closing months of the old year, as I saw article after article in the old media, especially The New York Times, attacking the new media, especially Facebook, I couldn’t help wondering if there were not a certain overconfidence behind their offensive. Perhaps some editor at the paper, mindful of the rise in online subscriptions to the Times and other avowedly anti-Trump organs and full of rosy, if still-uncertain, expectations of a damning report forthcoming from Robert Mueller, had persuaded the powers that be that their campaign against the president was all but won and that they could turn to a new enemy before having quite subdued the old one.

Could this be the  Times’s own Operation Barbarossa? That, as you will remember, was the code name given to the German invasion of Russia in 1941 when Adolf Hitler, having grown drunk with power and the confidence born of previous successes, made the catastrophic mistake of opening a second front in his war for global domination before defeating a still-dangerous Britain, her empire, and her potential American allies in his rear. In the case of Facebook and other so-called “social media,” the temptation for conservatives must be to take Henry Kissinger’s view of the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s and hope that somehow both sides in this new struggle can lose. But it might be more realistic for embattled Trumpsters to take Churchill’s approach and welcome the devil himself as an ally