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By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
To spend more than a little time toggling between news sites of different bents is to notice a fierce debate over the American economy right now. Which matters more — the easing of inflation or the persistence of prices that many people can’t afford or accept? Low unemployment or high interest rates? Is the intensity of Americans’ bad feelings about the economy a sane response or a senseless funk estranged from their actual financial circumstances?
On such questions may the 2024 election turn, so the litigation of them is no surprise. It’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s the public relations war over it.
But never in my adult lifetime has that battle seemed so agonizingly beside the point, such a distraction from the most important questions before us. In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.
I’m not talking about what will influence voters most. I’m talking about what should. And I write that knowing that I’ll be branded an elitist whose good fortune puts him out of touch with the concerns of people living paycheck to paycheck or priced out of housing and medical care. I am lucky — privileged, to use and own the word of the moment — and I’m an imperfect messenger, as blinded by the peculiarities of his experience in the world as others are by theirs.
But I don’t see any clear evidence that a change of presidents would equal an uptick in Americans’ living standards. And 2024, in any case, isn’t shaping up to be a normal election with normal stakes or anything close to that, at least not if Donald Trump winds up with the Republican presidential nomination — the likeliest outcome, to judge by current conditions. Not if he’s beaten by a Republican who had to buy into his fictions or emulate his ugliness to claim the prize. Not if the Republican Party remains hostage to the extremism on display in the House over these past few months.
That assessment isn’t Trump derangement syndrome. It’s straightforward observation, consistent with Liz Cheney’s new memoir, “Oath and Honor,” at which my Times colleague Peter Baker got an advance peek. Cheney describes House Republicans’ enduring surrender to Trump as cowardly and cynical, and she’s cleareyed on what his nomination in 2024 would mean. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she writes. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”
Trump has been saying, doing and contemplating some especially terrifying things lately, and while many of them wash over a populace exhausted by and inured to his puerile rants, outlandish provocations and petty-dictator diatribes, they’re not just the same old same old.
They’re not just theater, either. Long gone are the days when Trump’s darkest comments and direst vows could be dismissed as perverse performance art — as huffing and puffing that wouldn’t and couldn’t amount to all that much. That soothing myth died once and for all during the final months of his presidency, when he layered the Big Lie atop the heaving mountain of little and medium-size ones and cheered on a mob making its way to the Capitol.
And the notion that he’d at some point be contained by fellow Republicans who would put up with only so much? What a quaint hope that was. Most of those Republicans cowered before him. Most still do. The two current runners-up for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, raised their hands when they were asked, during a debate in August, about whether they’d support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he was convicted of felonies. That’s why the stakes of this election are titanic even without Trump on the ballot. The stain of him is deep and wide.
The fact of him is scarier and scarier. Last week he sent out his Thanksgiving message, a social media post whose eccentric punctuation and erratic capitalization were the typographical equivalent of spittle, at 2 a.m., and he didn’t use it to wish supporters and other Americans well. He roasted his perceived enemies, presenting a platter of slurs with all the semantic trimmings: “Radical Left Lunatics,” “Psycho,” “Marxists,” “Communists.”
Just two weeks earlier, for Veterans Day, he traded inspiration for fulmination in a speech in New Hampshire, promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Like vermin! And the month before that, he said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump has been saying, doing and contemplating some especially terrifying things lately.
His bastard music is consequential because it’s paired with a “series of plans by Mr. Trump and his allies that would upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law if he regained the White House,” as Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage wrote in a recent Times article that all voters should read once, then read again, then commit to memory so they can refer to it constantly. Those plans include the use of military funds for huge detention camps for undocumented immigrants, a Justice Department turned into a personal revenge force and ideological litmus tests for federal employees to ensure maximal sycophancy.
Have Haley and DeSantis grabbed hold of this potent ammunition to make a more forceful case for themselves? Hardly. They’re no more eager to take on Trump the budding fascist than they are to take on Trump the practiced fantasist, because they prioritize coddling his supporters and gaining power over standing up for the rule of law and the integrity of democracy. And DeSantis, in any case, is styling himself as the efficient version of Trump — more bang for your contemptuous buck.
It’s in that context that a focus on the prices of eggs and gas seems, well, like a luxury.
David Sedaris has been busy! In The New Yorker last week, he acknowledged that “you can’t hold animals to human standards” — a cat that kills a songbird is simply being a cat, just as a wolf that devours a calf is following its nature. “That said, rams are assholes,” Sedaris wrote. “We’ve had them on our property for five years now, a slightly different mob every summer, and each new addition is meaner than the last. Light a bonfire in their pasture and they’d likely head-butt the flames, just to show them who’s who.” (Thanks to Susan Caruso of Glen Head, N.Y., for nominating this.) The essay’s title, with its nod to the novelist Thomas Harris and his protagonist Clarice Starling, provided additional delight: “The Violence of the Rams.”
A separate Sedaris essay — about hypersensitivity in general and hypercoddled children in particular — appeared last week in The Free Press. He observed, “Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left.” He’s clearly on a zoological bent.
Back to The New Yorker: Elizabeth Kolbert noted that the composition and impact of a product can be very different things. “Silicon chips are essentially made of quartz, although this is a bit like saying that the Mona Lisa is essentially made of linseed oil,” she wrote. (Stephen Markscheid, Wilmette, Ill.)
In The Guardian, Joel Golby raved about the streaming series “Slow Horses,” saying that its star, Gary Oldman, “looks so deliciously dreadful as Jackson Lamb, lank hair combed down with chipshop grease, a Fergie-red nose with pores the size of saucers, staggering around like a huge garlic bulb learned how to walk.” (Katie Baer, Pittsboro, N.C.)
In his newsletter Old Goats, Jonathan Alter paid tribute to Charlie Peters, the founder of The Washington Monthly: “In a world of received wisdom, Charlie was a genuinely original thinker, with a mind that forged ores of common sense into a brilliant alloy of skepticism and idealism.” (Peter Magnusson, Chico, Calif.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Greg Ip marveled at the grinding fiscal woes of South America’s third-most-populous country: “Argentina is the bedtime horror story that other economies use to scare each other.” (Derek Dorn, Brooklyn)
In The Age of Melbourne, Australia, Matthew Knott examined the recent ouster of Michael Pezzullo, Australia’s Department of Home Affairs secretary: “To say that Pezzullo knew where the bodies were buried in Home Affairs would be a massive understatement. More like he dug the burial plots, carved the tombstones and managed the cemetery’s day-to-day operations.” (Drew Tagliabue, Manhattan)
In The Washington Post, Quentin Letts imagined the thinking that preceded the recruitment of David Cameron back into Britain’s government: “The former P.M. is a deliciously smooth creature, as luxurious as a vintage Bentley. Smoky voice, peachy cheeks, a drawling bedside manner — he has all the political gifts. Best of all, his appointment would be a coup de théâtre. Surprise is an underrated commodity in politics, for it denies opponents the chance to get their insults in first.” (Marian Cannell, Durham, N.C.)
In The Times, Peter C. Baker described the experience of a “new” Beatles single, “Now and Then,” that’s an A.I.-stitched patchwork of previously existing Beatles scraps: “The image that formed in my mind as I listened and relistened was that of a spotless, echoey mausoleum, built from shiny gray marble and haunted by garbled digital cries that sound like people I once knew, trying to connect across impossible distances.” (Dan Humiston, McKinleyville, Calif., and Joshua Michael, Bainbridge Island, Wash., among others)
And Tom Friedman cautioned that you cannot properly see the conflict in the Middle East through any simple lens: “If you want to report accurately about Israelis and Palestinians, always bring a kaleidoscope.” (Deborah Kurtz, Kalkan, Turkey)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
Just when I think can’t bear another word about some public figure, along comes an Olivia Nuzzi profile of that person that makes me greedily read thousands of words more. Her sketch of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in New York magazine last week isn’t to be missed. It combines character study with presidential-election arithmetic in a deft and fluid (and frightening) fashion, and the descriptions of Kennedy’s dog-mobile — you’ll see — are alone worth the price of admission.
Two of the ways in which the dearth of local news might be addressed — with enterprising start-ups and with student journalism — converge in this excellent article in The Assembly, a nearly three-year-old publication that covers North Carolina, by Charlotte Kramon, a senior at Duke University. It’s about “a drug-dealing duo and their college student clients,” and it’s a cautionary tale on several fronts.
Also here in North Carolina, Eric Johnson had a sane, eloquent take in The News & Observer of Raleigh on how colleges should — and, indeed, sometimes do — respond to charged events like the Israel-Hamas war.
This is the time of year when I try to dip into the deep pool of awards-season films, and while I’m barely wet, I’m already a bit disappointed. I found “Killers of the Flower Moon” draggy and repetitive, and Lily Gladstone and Robert DeNiro didn’t seem to be acting in the same movie; their performances weren’t in stylistic sync. (I liked hers better.) “Saltburn,” meantime, isn’t in sync with itself. It’s what you’d get if you decided, for no good reason, to make a shepherd’s pie of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Gosford Park” — something overstuffed and nonsensical, as Wesley Morris explained brilliantly in his review in The Times. Still, I was glad not to miss Rosamund Pike’s supporting performance as an obscenely wealthy woman in thrall to her own (imagined) modesty and goodness. And I was glad not to miss “The Holdovers,” period. The story of three melancholic souls forming an unlikely union during a subdued holiday season, it’s lovely, and Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as that trio, harmonize beautifully.
I suppose I got my first notice that Leslie, the eldest of my nine nieces and nephews, was all grown up when she graduated from college in 2018.
I got a reminder three years later, when she and her college sweetheart married.
But it somehow didn’t really hit home until last week, on the night before Thanksgiving, when she and her husband, Charlie, had a few family members, including me, over to their New York City apartment for dinner.
There they were, harried from their long workdays — she as a consultant, he as a lawyer. They had a proper dining room table properly set for guests. They had a full meal ready. Leslie poured the wine for me, after all those years of me pouring the wine for her.
I felt completely disoriented. It has always been my understanding that an uncle provides the sustenance, an uncle plots the fun and an uncle foots the bill. Isn’t that the whole point of being an uncle? I’m kidding, partly; there’s also the love and cheerleading and listening and admiring.
But as a glutton and an Italian American, I’ve taken particular pride in feeding my nieces and nephews: cookies when their parents weren’t looking, ice cream when I wasn’t supposed to, cocktails when they were old enough. All of that was on me. I liked it that way.
But last Wednesday night was on Leslie and Charlie. Can I grow to like that?
I’ll try. But I’m still picking up the check when we eat out.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram • Threads • @FrankBruni • Facebook
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