This is, indeed, what “Trump supporters believe.” It’s also false, paranoid, and bigoted. Unfortunately, in her desire to align herself with those “real Americans”—who don’t read The Wall Street Journal op-ed page—Noonan has adopted the habit of implying that whatever Trump supporters or their xenophobic European counterparts “believe” is true. Then she excoriates politicians for not shifting their policies in response.

Take Noonan’s latest column about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision last summer to admit 800,000 asylum seekers. “The result,” Noonan writes, “has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation, and fears of terrorism.” Notice the conflation of perception and reality. Noonan doesn’t quite say that refugees increase rates of crime and terrorism or that they don’t assimilate, whatever that means. That would require evidence. (In fact, German police report that refugees are less likely to commit crime than other Germans and that the vast majority of crime they do commit is nonviolent.) Instead, Noonan merely says there has been a “public furor” about crime, terrorism, and a refusal to assimilate. Then she’s off to the races, excoriating Merkel for her insensitivity to those ordinary Germans “dealing with crime and extremism.”

Obviously, large-scale immigration—whether to the United States or Germany—brings strains as well as benefits. But Noonan makes no real effort to weigh them. (As evidence of the terrorism German refugees commit, she cites a July massacre at a Munich McDonald’s by a mentally disturbed, bullied German-Iranian teenager who, according to news reports, was inspired by the right-wing Norwegian mass-murderer Andres Breivik.) Rather, Noonan begins with the fears of those people most hostile to immigration, whom she dubs the “unprotected,” and attacks as elitist anyone who doesn’t make policy based on their desires. The phrase itself is revealing.

Which Americans, according to Noonan’s definition, are “unprotected”? Not African Americans or Latinos, who overwhelmingly loathe Trump and generally support pro-immigration candidates. (After all, haven’t conservatives spent decades saying African Americans are too protected by the government?) Not young people, who also largely shun Trump and disproportionately back a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, despite being more economically vulnerable than their elders. By “unprotected,” Noonan means the older, overwhelmingly white, largely male Americans who support Trump.

The problem with this categorization is that, compared with the rest of the American population, Trump supporters are fairly well protected. They are protected by their race and gender and even their age, since the American welfare state takes far better care of the elderly than of the young. As Nate Silver has noted, Trump supporters actually earn more than supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. After concluding a massive new study comparing Trump supporters with Americans at large, Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell recently noted that, although Trump says his supporters are “suffering because of globalization, … suffering because of immigration and a diversifying country, … I can’t find any evidence of that.”