When Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election, there was a collective sense of shock — I don’t think even he expected to win. This time, it’s giving resignation and despair — or triumphalism depending on your political persuasion.

The last time this happened, scholars and journalists sought to explain what then seemed inexplicable. Pizzagate and a proliferation of false information online, circulated in part by Russian bots, felt new. Trump’s penchant for conspiracism, his blatant disregard for fact-based reasoning, felt especially threatening to professions nominally devoted to documenting empirical reality. Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its word of the year.

By focusing on misinformation and disinformation, journalists and scholars found a seemingly apolitical and nonpartisan solution to a fundamentally political problem. Foundations and social media companies — not to mention news outlets that remained stubbornly committed to old fashioned objectivity norms — loved this framing. It allowed journalists and academics, in particular, to “do something” about the media conditions thought to have given rise to Trumpism, while remaining steadfast in their long-held commitments to political impartiality.

Large sums of money flooded into the academy, funding new centers and studies of media effects and media literacy. News outlets created new beats — devoting resources to fact-checking and reporting on various false claims and misinformation campaigns. “Someone is wrong on the Internet” became news.

Like the early 20th-century propaganda analysis it mirrored, this mis/disinformation paradigm was always based on a false premise. It posited Trump voters as dupes — haplessly tricked by false information, by “fake news.” It positioned misinformation as a cause of political disagreement instead of recognizing that facts themselves — their veracity, their meaning, their political implications — have always been a site of political disagreement and contestation.

By pretending that there is a simple, non-contested “information” against which we can measure “mis”-information, we’ve assumed common standards of judgment that do not exist. By pretending that “facts have a liberal bias,” we have ceded the terrain of ideological struggle to the right. While we insisted on the self-evidence of empirical reality, Trump has fine-tuned a political narrative of the world that offers a more salient (if horrific) interpretation of that reality.

The time has come for a different approach. The time has come for right-wing studies.

By and large, Trump voters don’t support him because they are confused, or lacking in information. They vote for him because he aligns with their values and interests, as they understand them. Right-wing studies seeks to understand these values and interests, even and especially when they conflict with established understandings of empirical reality and their presumed political implications.

Right-wing studies seeks to understand the world as understood by right-wingers — not to validate or valorize that worldview, but to gain insights helpful in shaping it toward different political ends.

Journalism and press analysis rooted in right-wing studies would not be so concerned with bolstering some empiricist notion of “truth.” It would focus, instead, on documenting and understanding the social and cultural conditions that render that empiricist truth irrelevant to large swaths of the population. It would acknowledge that facts mean nothing outside of interpretation, that truth does not exist outside of persuasion.

Factual accuracy is a necessary but insufficient goal of professional journalism. Journalists need to compile facts into a vision of reality that is more compelling than that offered by right-wing media and by Donald Trump.

One thing the press can and should do right now toward this end: mitigate the harms of a second Trump administration by amplifying and exacerbating the contradictions internal to U.S. conservatism.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic messaging sought to convey Republicans as a monolith. Project 2025 was put forth as evidence of a conservative conspiracy to fundamentally transform our country and put an end to democracy. While there is much to fear about the ideological vision advanced by Project 2025, several of its proposals are either internally contradictory or reflect real disagreements within the right over how best to wield governmental authority.

As historians of the right know well, and as an emboldened and over-reaching Trump will soon find out, U.S. conservatism is a motley coalition of contradictory visions, interests, and personalities. This creates real policy and personal wedges to be exploited. Journalists should seek them out. Report on them. Make them fight each other so they can’t unite against the rest of us.

If we’ve learned anything in the past eight years, it’s that journalists and academics are not on the sidelines of political conflict. Professional knowledge creators are, wittingly or not, engaged in political work. The right has long understood that reality is socially, culturally, and politically constructed. It’s time we act accordingly ourselves.