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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.
About an hour and a half after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire, he appeared onstage at a victory rally in Nashua, N.H., to bask in his accomplishment and bash lesser mortals. Bask-and-bash is his preferred M.O., an indulgence of the love he feels for himself and the contempt he feels for almost everybody else, and his bearing and remarks indeed had a familiar, compulsory ring. As Trump performances go, it was an unremarkable one.
And yet so utterly revealing. So perfectly emblematic. CNN, which I happened to be watching, went live to Nashua and stayed with him for maybe 10 minutes, maybe less — the new fashion is to mete out attention to Trump modestly, carefully, lest he get too big a megaphone for his lies — and yet that abbreviated encounter provided ample information. I was struck by all that it communicated.
Such as the sycophancy surrounding Trump. Right behind him, visible over his shoulder, was Senator Tim Scott, a man who prides himself on his faith and decency, a former rival of Trump’s for the Republican nomination, now another toady in Trump’s service, surely angling to be his running mate, already on board as a campaign-trail surrogate. Scott was smiling broadly. It was as sad an expression as I’ve ever seen. Maybe sacrificing scruples on the altar of ambition is more joyful than I ever imagined. Maybe Stockholm syndrome takes effect more quickly and fully than I ever realized.
Or maybe Scott was intent on being as sunny a sidekick to Trump as Vivek Ramaswamy, who jittered into the frame to take a turn at the microphone and declare his devotion. Trump is an inconstant ally, but no matter: He’s rewarded with a retinue of fawners and flatterers. It’s a parable of conquest. It’s also morally pathetic.
During Trump’s own time at the microphone, he called Nikki Haley an “impostor” because she spoke on Tuesday night as if she’d had a good showing when, actually, she’d been vanquished. Gee, of whom does that remind me? Maybe Trump circa November 2020 to January 2021? Maybe Trump to this day?
Trump accused the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who’d endorsed Haley, of being on uppers. He claimed that President Biden “can’t put two sentences together.”
Just a minute before, he put together these two sentences: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.” The first of those is laughably false. The second distills the gleeful and gloating ugliness of his brand and of his movement.
Trump also said that Haley, contrary to her claims, doesn’t beat Biden in polls that pit her against him. Untrue. He said that he had a flawless track record in New Hampshire from 2016 to the present. “We win the primary,” he boasted. “We win the generals.” He must have meant the general elections, and that’s dead wrong. Hillary Clinton very narrowly beat Trump in New Hampshire in 2016. Biden beat him there in 2020 by more than seven percentage points.
Fantasy in place of reality. Insults in lieu of inspiration. A clutch of sellouts jockeying for his favor and fluffing his ego. It was all there because that’s all there is. I watched Trump only briefly and saw the highlights of his political odyssey to this point and the whole of the campaign ahead. It’s a scary vision. Welcome to 2024.
For the Love of Sentences
In The New Yorker, Leslie Jamison described her eagerness, as she tried to avert her gaze from her failing marriage, for engagements and obligations that tugged her from home. “Every work itinerary was like a hall pass in school,” she wrote. “Part of me was always looking for reasons to be away. The tides might tell themselves stories about why they’re rushing in and out, but it’s ultimately the moon that’s in charge.” (Thanks to Christian Rotunno of Nevada City, Calif., and Carol Breimeier of Tucson, Ariz., for nominating this.)
Jamison’s essay, adapted from her new memoir, “Splinters,” had many such keepers. My favorite, predictably, was food-related. “Our fridge was full of rotting aspirations: the salad-bound cucumber, now leaking brown fluid; the forgotten, softening strawberries; the marinara sauce furred with mold,” Jamison wrote.
In Monocle, Robert Bound reviewed the viral Calvin Klein commercial that shows the impressively muscled star of “The Bear,” Jeremy Allen White, scaling and then stretching out atop a tall Manhattan building in nothing more than very tight boxer briefs: “It’s as though White has climbed a fire escape to reveal Mount Tushmore.” (Padraig Cronin, London)
In The Times Union of Albany, Steve Barnes assessed a very hot pepper spread: “Remember the old advertising line ‘A little dab’ll do ya’? For Mr. Naga Hot Pepper Pickle, it’s more like a little dab’ll do ya in.” (Bill Callen, Selkirk, N.Y.)
In her obituary in The Times of Peter Schickele, a.k.a. the musical parodist P.D.Q. Bach, Margalit Fox wrote: “Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.” (Joe Moorman, Manlius, N.Y., and Michael Torguson, Medford, Ore., among others)
Also in The Times, Dwight Garner described the writer Calvin Trillin’s renown as a eulogist: “I’ve known people to attend the funerals of people they’ve never met because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking, in the manner that an N.B.A. nonfan might attend a Knicks game solely because he’d heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)
O.K., I could avoid politics for only so long.
Going back to The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells took stock of Trump’s behavior in the face of defamation charges by E. Jean Carroll: “Trump wasn’t required to appear at the Carroll trial at all. But he found it politically advantageous to be there, not so much menacing the courtroom as Dennis-the-Menacing it.” (Glenn Lambert, Los Angeles)
In The Washington Post, Monica Hesse marveled — and not in a happy way — at Trump’s durable domination of our attention and our moods: “When sociologists and historians study this period of time, I wonder if this will be the most lasting psychological stain. Not any specific acts, but the general weight, the inescapable pull, the black hole, the fog, the fug, the reality that our atmosphere is coated in a thin, smoggy layer of Donald Trump.” (Spencer Ralston, Santa Fe, N.M., and Gussy Turner, Sutton, Quebec)
Also in The Post, Alexandra Petri bemoaned G.O.P. revisionism about Trump’s presidency: “I understand that rewriting history is a big element of the current Republican platform. The Civil War was a fun dispute with a lot of beautiful people on both sides, about everything but slavery. But it’s especially uncanny when the history getting rewritten is so recent. It’s barely history. I was alive for this! This is barely two Taylor Swift albums ago!” (Bonnie Shaffer, Lancaster, Pa.)
In The Guardian, David Smith eulogized Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid: “DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.” (Tom Powell, Vestavia Hills, Ala.)
And in Politico, Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos identified a fundamental problem with DeSantis’s candidacy: “The campaign introduced him to the nation as a bright but socially awkward introvert, a nerd who did not enjoy people — which was a problem since voters tend to be people.” (Richard Shull, Greensboro, N.C., and Minty Smyth, Tiverton, R.I.)
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.
Expectations play such a huge role in our experience of the culture we consume, and mine for “American Fiction” perhaps guaranteed that it would let me down. So many people were raving about it. The trailer was pure gold. But I felt that I was watching two different movies that were trying unsuccessfully to reconcile themselves into one, with jarring shifts in tone and pacing. Even so, I’d recommend it for the sequences in which the pointed social commentary genuinely pricks and for the performances, including the Oscar-nominated turns of Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown.
Speaking of Oscar nominations, which came out Tuesday morning, I always enjoy reading the “snubs and surprises” sidebars that become a way of revisiting the previous year’s most notable and intensely debated movies. The Daily Beast, gathering contributions from several of its writers, had an especially thorough and spirited one. I also liked Nate Jones’s take in Vulture. My own random additions to the discussion: Although she was a long shot, I’m bummed not to see Rosamund Pike in the best supporting actress race, for “Saltburn” — I loved that performance — and thought Dominic Sessa, so crucial to “The Holdovers,” should have received a best supporting actor nod. I was delighted that Annette Bening and Jodie Foster were nominated, for best actress and best supporting actress respectively, for their work in “Nyad,” an odd and flawed movie redeemed by the master class in acting that they provide.
Nikki Haley has put up an energetic fight against Trump, but did she ever have a shot, or were the Trump-panicked among us engaged in magical thinking? That’s the subject of an essay that I wrote about the New Hampshire primary results.
I admired the way in which my Times colleague Nick Kristof recently engaged readers’ questions about and criticisms of his coverage of the Israel-Hamas war; it acknowledged how deeply many people feel about that conflict and it modeled respectful disagreement. Nick will be visiting Duke University on Monday, Feb. 5, and I’ll talk to him onstage that evening about his journalism and some of the main challenges that the world and America face right now. Details about the event, which is free and open to the public, are here.
In the Leslie Jamison essay mentioned earlier in this newsletter, she recalled her mother’s once asking her: “What is your gut telling you?” “But the question didn’t help,” Jamison wrote. “My gut wasn’t a voice to be trusted.”
Nor is mine.
I once wrote a whole book about my tortured relationship with my gut, but that concerned eating. I have an equally tortured relationship with my gut when it comes to deciding: What to write? Whom to believe? How and when to put myself out there? How and when to protect myself?
Oh, I listen to my gut, because we’re incessantly told to, as if it’s some all-knowing therapist, some inadequately revered deity, a sort of colander with which we rinse away noise and nonsense so that only wisdom remains. Well, my colander is fickle.
It presents me with one kind of wisdom in the evening, another kind in the morning. I believe for an entire day or a whole week that the essay I’m writing or the plan I’m forming is genius, only to appraise it anew and deem it all wrong. In both cases, my gut is talking to me, but across time, it speaks in tongues. I need a translator for it. I need a gut for my gut.
And what is this vaunted, mythic gut? If it’s a seemingly snap judgment that’s actually processing all sorts of information, along the lines of what Malcolm Gladwell described in his book “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” we should indeed heed it. But what if it’s just an emotional spasm? An evanescent mood? Then it’s a pagan idol, leading us astray.
I think it’s a messy mix of all of the above, plus something else: a prod to make up your mind and be done with it. To stop equivocating. To commit. “Listen to your gut” in part means flip a coin, roll the dice and then move on. And that’s indeed sensible, inasmuch as the alternative — being frozen in place, unwilling to act — is untenable.
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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