Day in and day out, year after year, the propaganda has flowed straight into the national psyche. An ordinary person who trusts the news does not stand a chance against such a constant stream of one-sided hostility.
I was standing on a crowded bus with my hands firmly gripping the straps overhead to keep from falling. Around me stood people from all walks of life and countries, tired after a long journey.
I had just landed at Keflavík Airport, and we were on our way to the terminal. Beside me stood two middle-aged women speaking Norwegian. I asked where they had been, and they told me they had been on holiday in Iceland and were on their way home.
We chatted for a while, and one of the women told me that she had been to America once, visiting a relative with Norwegian roots in Melbourne.
– What a strange coincidence, I said. –That is where I live. She told me that her cousin worked in the space industry at Cape Canaveral, and that they had had an absolutely wonderful time.
– When are you planning to visit him again? I asked, thinking that perhaps I could meet her there. We Norwegians do like meeting our own when we are abroad. At least I do. They seemed like two pleasant ladies.
At that very second, the sky darkened. The sharp Icelandic sun suddenly disappeared behind heavy, threatening clouds, and Thor with his hammer thundered in the distance. The woman’s face changed from friendly to contorted with rage. Her eyes narrowed, her mouth became a hard line, and all her soft facial features disappeared into a grimace of disgust.
– Not until you get a new president, she hissed.
‘You must be kidding me,’ I thought. ‘Is this possible?’ I was so dumbfounded that I was lost for words, and nearly lost my grip on the strap overhead, so that I came close to falling headlong to the floor. When I finally regained my powers of speech and my balance, all I could manage was to stammer something incoherent about Joe Biden.
But it was too late. The bus stopped, the double doors opened, and we got out. The two ladies did not say goodbye. The one who was obviously suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, seemed extremely pleased with her outburst, and strode brazenly ahead of me inside.
‘Don’t let it get to you,’ I told myself. But it did get to me. Not because of the woman’s opinion of Trump. It was the sudden, bizarre transformation. And she seemed so proud of it. A living internet troll.
It was deeply disturbing. And really just sad.
Here I meet one of my own countrymen. We have a pleasant, perfectly ordinary conversation, and suddenly she turns into an unpleasant, two-headed troll because of one simple, friendly question: When are you going to visit America again?
She seemed as though she were possessed by some kind of demonic spirit that prevented her from controlling herself and showing ordinary courtesy and the kind of manners we learnt while growing up.
Passport control
My thoughts were churning as I approached passport control. I handed the young Icelandic woman my American passport.
She saw that I was born in Norway and demanded that I show my Norwegian passport. – But I live in the US, I said. – The Icelandair staff in Orlando told me to use my American passport.
Besides, my Norwegian passport was buried deep in my backpack and was difficult to get to.
The queue behind me grew with impatient travellers.
The little know-it-all, young enough to be my granddaughter, continued her crusade to prevent me from using my American passport. She was absolutely determined to lecture me on why I should use the Norwegian one.
I told her that she could not refuse to let me use my American passport, and eventually she relented.
I almost expected Icelandic stormtroopers to appear, escort me out and send me straight back to the US. But that did not happen.
Give someone a badge and a uniform, and they think they are in charge of the whole world.
Normally, I would have complied, but I was tired after the journey and was practically suffering from PTSD after my encounter with the TDS-infected woman on the bus.
For that matter, what difference did it make to the Icelandic woman at passport control which passport I used? Did she have the same anti-American and anti-Trump attitude that I had just encountered in the Norwegian lady?
My conspiracy thoughts were running at full speed, so I concluded that she probably did. Besides, the majority of Icelanders regard the US more as an adversary than an ally.
That is how it is in most of Europe. All because of that president of yours.
Pompous, self-satisfied Europeans who think they are better than everyone else, and who are incapable of seeing that useless politicians in their own backyard are destroying their countries beyond recognition.
NRK said it, so it must be true!
As I walked out of passport control and into the terminal, the conversation with the Norwegian lady continued to churn in my mind. It was the abrupt, complete change in her behaviour that troubled me.
She did not even know me, but something had trained her to treat a stranger as an enemy because of a president she could not even vote for.
This is what years of influence from the European media do to people, I thought. They never set foot in the places they are so certain they know everything about. They simply absorb the daily drip-feed of contempt until it becomes part of their personality.
As I sat in the bar at Keflavík, I was annoyed that I had not been prepared. I had literally promised myself during my previous visit to Norway that I would rehearse some solid retorts for use in precisely such situations.
After all, it has only become worse and worse in the eleven years since Donald Trump first announced that he was running for president. You start off talking about the changeable weather or how expensive electricity has become, and suddenly the ugly orange man has forced his way into the conversation.
But this had been a chaotic trip, planned at the last minute because my mother was ill. There had been no time whatsoever to practise political defence strategies. But if I were completely honest with myself, I had simply forgotten, or buried the reminder somewhere deep in my mind.
What on earth could I have said?
When someone catches you completely off guard, you lose the power of speech, and it becomes impossible to think clearly. You have only a few seconds to make a point.
And from my own experience: The few times I have managed to get a comment in when Trump is mentioned, it is impossible to counter the argument or say ‘but that wasn’t what he said …’.
They know better than I do, even though I live in the US, because NRK said it!
A full-scale Trump meltdown in row three
I could have looked at her and said with calm confidence:
– Wow. That was an unexpected turn. We went from Iceland to the White House in under ten seconds.
– Wow, that was a rather rude thing to say to someone you don’t know. I thought we Norwegians tended to stick to pleasant conversation when we meet abroad.
Or I could have summoned the ultimate inner toughness, the kind of courageous attitude one really only has when sitting safely behind a keyboard:
– Oh, what a coincidence. I felt exactly the same about Støre and your tutti-frutti government. If I hadn’t already bought the tickets, I would have waited until you got another government. But hell will probably freeze over before that happens. Goodbye forever. Have a nice trip home.
If I were being really nasty, I could have said:
– So how does it feel to have Trump living rent-free in your head twenty-four hours a day? It must be an enormous burden, considering how ‘enormously’ overweight he is.
– Did you remember your TDS medication today, or is it still in your toiletry bag at home? You seem to be in stage 5 right now. That’s the stage where you hiss at random compatriots on Icelandic buses.
Or I could simply have shouted: – Excuse me, bus driver! We have a full-scale Trump meltdown in row three. She’s foaming at the mouth!
But of course I said none of this. Because such things only happen in Hollywood films.
The World Cup became the turning point
When I landed back in the US five weeks later, the story of the encounter in Iceland kept returning to my thoughts, but I never got around to writing about it.
And then the World Cup got under way.
Thousands of football supporters landed on American soil this summer. They walked the streets, ate the food, talked to perfectly ordinary people, sat in the stadiums, and suddenly people began saying on social media and in interviews: We’re sorry, America!
Some even cried as they spoke about their newfound love for the US and how wrong they had been about the country and its people.
Many took their own newspapers and television channels to task after having been fed one-sided poison for years. Germans, Dutch, English, South Africans, Australians and many others.
Perhaps some of them had landed on American soil with the same contorted grimace as the woman on the bus, but left having seen a completely different country from the one their media had told them about.
That only made the encounter on the Keflavík bus even sadder. That is the real tragedy of the indoctrinated Norwegian woman.
While many admit that they were deceived, she is, metaphorically speaking, still standing on that bus with her face contorted in disgust, waiting for America to become acceptable enough for her to visit her American cousin again.
A relentless, vicious campaign
She herself is responsible for her own hostility, but she is also the product of a much larger process. It is the result of years of one-sided media, intense groupthink and a culture that celebrates contempt and ridicule of an American president and half the people.
Recent surveys show the results. A dramatic increase in anti-Americanism, with only a small fraction of the population having any desire at all to visit the US these days.
The media in Norway had not merely criticised an American president. For more than ten years, they had waged a relentless, vicious and coordinated campaign designed to shock and frighten.
Day in and day out, year after year, the propaganda has flowed straight into the national psyche. An ordinary person who trusts the news does not stand a chance against such a constant stream of one-sided hostility.
When the woman stood beside me on the bus in Iceland, she was not even aware of the madness of her own thinking. She was willing to sacrifice another wonderful holiday with her cousin in Florida simply because Trump was still in the White House.
This is serious indoctrination. An entire country’s media apparatus had systematically deprived an ordinary woman of her independent judgement and inflicted upon her a programmed, vicious reflex.
It is the media’s job to exercise criticism and hold politicians to account, but the Norwegian press regularly crossed the line into outright demonisation of Trump and the Republicans.
We all remember these headlines and front pages. There are thousands of them, if not millions.
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What is perhaps even worse is the demonisation of those who actually voted for Trump. A recent example came from Dagbladet, which published an article in which it drew direct parallels between Charles Manson’s notorious murder cult and Trump’s supporters.
Think about that for a moment. They took an established American political movement consisting of tens of millions of ordinary, hard-working people and compared them with a notorious, psychotic death cult. That is extremely outrageous.
If an ordinary media consumer is fed that kind of psychological poison for eleven years, the hostile reaction is no accident. The woman on the bus exploded because the media had trained her to do precisely that.
The taxi driver Abdullah
A few hours after the episode with the Norwegian lady at Keflavík, I landed in Norway. The flight had been delayed, so I decided to take a taxi to Oslo Central Station. There were no cars at the taxi rank, but I was pleasantly surprised that my Uber app worked.
Abdullah is on his way, Uber told me. Just my luck. The taxi drivers Ola and Hans of my youth must have been busy taking their lunch break.
Abdullah was Albanian, spoke fluent Norwegian and seemed well integrated. He told me about his wife from Northern Norway, the children, his two jobs and how incredibly difficult it was to make ends meet. His wife did not work, and he complained that she and their teenage daughter loved spending money.
He was irritated at being forced to drive an electric car, and at how the state robs you of absolutely everything. Then, completely out of the blue, he turned around and asked:
– But you, living in the US, how do you survive with that president of yours?
Before I even had time to answer, he launched into a long tirade about Trump, tariffs and China. I eventually managed to squeeze in a few words and reminded him of the conversation we had just had about how miserable he was because of the state of affairs in Norway.
How much damage has Trump actually done to people’s lives in Norway, compared with what Norwegian politicians have done?
He nodded reluctantly and admitted that yes, people are asleep. But it was obvious that his thoughts were still completely fixated on Trump.
From there he veered off into America, Israel and Gaza, and there was nothing to do but keep my mouth shut.
But that is precisely the problem. The media have trained people to focus on Trump instead of their own politicians and their own empty wallets. It is frightening.
An icy north wind on the Bergen Line
Abdullah dropped me off at Oslo Central Station, and I quickly stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy something to drink.
As I entered the shop, it was impossible to avoid the newspaper racks. Every single newspaper had Trump on the front page with some sensational headline or other, and of course with the ugliest, most distorted photograph they could find.
Ironically, the front pages screamed about precisely the same tariffs that Abdullah had just been so upset about.
What I thought at that precise moment is not fit to print. Let us just say that it was the unfiltered version we see on X every day: You simply cannot hate the mainstream media enough.
I eventually made it onto the train and found my seat on the Bergen Line. My ticket was in the same seating group as three women who were already sitting there chatting away. After a little light small talk, I asked them a polite question: – Are you Americans?
Suddenly, the temperature in the carriage dropped dramatically. It was as though the conductor had thrown all the windows wide open. An icy north wind blew through the carriage, and in what must have been a hallucination, I saw a huge, chubby orange baby Trump in a nappy floating above our heads.
The women’s facial expressions immediately shifted to pure contempt. One of them hissed back: – No, thank God we are not!
There was absolutely no doubt what she meant. I have spoken to many Canadians over the years, and this was not normal behaviour. They aggressively signalled their own moral superiority and contempt for our leadership to a complete stranger.
In hindsight, of course, I know exactly what I should have said:
– Oh, why the hostile attitude all of a sudden? Has baby Trump in a nappy forced his way into your brains? By the way, do you like your new communist leader, or do you miss Fidel Castro’s son, pretty-boy Trudeau?
But as usual, at the moment of truth, I said none of this.
It turned out that the three women were touring Norway, and their next stop was Bergen. They boasted unreservedly about how wonderful Norway was and all the pleasant, beautiful people. They would have got along perfectly with the lady from the Keflavík bus.
They were obviously wealthy, were staying at a luxury hotel at Tjuvholmen and travelled purely as a hobby.
It is incredibly easy for such privileged people to dismiss nearly 80 million ordinary Americans, people who are tired of not being heard and who vote for a president who promises change.
You never escape the narrative
When I finally unpacked my suitcase at my mother’s house, I felt as though I should have laid a place for a third person at the dinner table.
Between the woman on the bus in Iceland, the taxi driver, the Canadian tourists on the train and the distorted faces of the president at 7-Eleven, Trump had effectively been my shadow for the past twenty-four hours.
I thought that walking into my mother’s living room would finally give me some breathing space, but she had NRK P1 humming in the background. Precisely on the hour came the hourly news bulletin, which began with Trump and ended with Trump.
In my own mind, I thought: ‘So here you are. You can travel across the Atlantic, ride in taxis and buses, take trains and enter a private home, but you never escape the narrative.’
The machine hums away around the clock, an uninterrupted conveyor belt indoctrinating everyone within earshot. It was then that the full extent of the problem became crystal clear to me.
It is not merely about an isolated, aggressive stranger on a bus or a sensational front page in a shop.
It is a systematic background noise that shapes the minds of normal, decent people while they are simply trying to live their lives.
You really cannot despise the mainstream media enough.