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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........