If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. Insult everyone. Answer for nothing.
I imagine Pam Bondi getting ready for one of her appearances on Capitol Hill by practicing in front of a mirror. She hones her glare. She perfects her sneer. She rehearses her lines, such as they are. “Washed-up, loser lawyer!” That’s for Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. What the phrase lacks in poetry it makes up for in pithiness. It’s just four short words, two of them conveniently conjoined with a hyphen. Even Bondi can remember that much. “Failed politician!” That’s for Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky. Two words. Insults are all about efficiency. But it’s not Bondi’s script that matters most. It’s her voice, and the attorney general got the tone of it — the poison in it — just right when she spat those put-downs at those men during her, um, testimony before a House panel last week. She didn’t merely ooze contempt. She gushed it, so that all she communicated during more than four hours of nasty exchanges was how loathsome she found her interrogators. Which was obviously her goal. Her mission. I can’t get it out of my mind. But then I never stopped thinking about her identical performance before a Senate panel last October. Both crystallized what is arguably the defining trait of the second Trump administration, a bearing and a bullying that cast a noxious haze over all public discourse, which was already plenty polluted. This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, President Trump himself — don’t want to win opponents’ favor. They don’t even want to win the argument. Why sweat the delicate art of persuasion when you can use the brute force of condemnation? Comity and conciliation are a slog. They’re for suckers. Contempt is victors’ ready, heady prerogative. It’s also what the MAGA movement was supposed to be rebelling against. Many people who flocked to Trump in all his spite and willful destructiveness were protesting the condescension and derision of the Democratic elite, who, they felt, held them in contempt. They were responding to Barack Obama’s lament about embittered Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” They were reacting to Hillary Clinton’s gibe about the “basket of deplorables.” At least that’s one origin theory, one narrative thread. But Trump, his aides and many of his supporters haven’t purged contempt from our politics. They’ve mainstreamed it. Purified it. Industrialized it. It’s their push-a-button pushback against everyone who challenges them and any circumstances that threaten to undermine them, an all-purpose way to pivot from the substance of a situation to an evasive and obfuscating ill will. Envelop everything in indiscriminate animosity and nothing real survives. That’s what Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Miller, the impresario of ugliness, did when federal agents killed protesters in Minneapolis. Smear first, ask questions later (or, better yet, never). Contempt is the default setting for Vance’s crude comments, to which George F. Will devoted much of a recent column in The Washington Post. “It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress,” Will wrote of the climate Vance inhabits. “Undaunted, he tries.” Will added: “Performative politics is almost the only politics on offer nowadays. But must it be a coarseness and flippancy competition?” For Vance, Bondi & Co., yes, it must, because that’s a contest they can win. Vance has only a scintilla of the experience that many previous vice presidents had. But he can best them in contemptuousness. Pete Hegseth’s résumé pales next to those of many defense secretaries before him. But he can radiate a magnitude of disgust with perceived adversaries that they never did. The brazen bunch of them model a new idea and exercise of strength, which, to them, isn’t something achieved and fortified by learning from your mistakes. It’s something that puts you in a position to tell others that the mistakes are theirs, call them names and lick your chops as you do. It doesn’t empower you to reach out to your opponents or show them mercy. Mercy is what you make them beg for, so you can savor the pleasure of denying it. And the way you consolidate and perpetuate power is by so thoroughly demonizing those opponents — by blasting so much contempt at them — that your own failures, corruption and cruelty become irrelevant. You needn’t answer for your fatal thuggery in Minneapolis if you can render its casualties sufficiently contemptible. You needn’t answer questions from a “washed-up, loser lawyer” or a “failed politician” at all. Bondi came into that hearing last week as a joke, a disgrace, the titular head of a Justice Department that had seen its politically motivated prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James dismissed by a federal judge, its requested indictment of six Democratic lawmakers rejected by a federal grand jury, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files exposed as a travesty. What she should have been feeling and projecting was humiliation. She opted for contempt. It’s the Trumpian way. But is it the American one? Has the country sunk quite this far? I don’t think so. She and her fellow insult mongers aren’t owning the libs; they’re beclowning themselves. And it’s a repellent circus. Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday. For the Love of Sentences
In his new newsletter, Ron Charles, a superb book critic for The Washington Post before he was among the hundreds of journalists recently let go by Jeff Bezos’s shriveling news organization, assessed the president’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast: “Donald Trump delivered a speech that wandered for 40 years in the desert of vanities and grievances. If nothing else — and surely there was nothing else — the president’s spectacle would have made a confirmed atheist pray.” (Thanks to Stephen S. Power, Maplewood, N.J., and Chris Hess, of Bluffton, S.C., for nominating this.) In The New Yorker, Becca Rothfeld observed that Bezos’ explanation for eliminating the books section — he said he’s just heeding data about what readers want — fit with the mechanistic approach to peddling books themselves by another of his companies, Amazon: “Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all?” (Steven A. Schreiber, Kennett Square, Penn.) Also in The New Yorker, Helen Rosner pondered the strained exclusivity and flamboyant luxuries of restaurants peddling slabs of beef to proud carnivores: “This is the dissonance of all steak houses, really; the rough-and-ready cowboy mythology is forever at odds with the fundamental frilliness of the performance of wealth, which is built on that least manly-man of things: caring what other people think.” (Cynthia Martin, St. Catharines, Ontario) And Alexander Nazaryan flashed back to the childhood of a senior federal official who terrorized Minneapolis. “When Gregory K. Bovino was a boy, he saw a movie called ‘The Border,’ a crime thriller about corruption among U.S. Border Patrol officers working in El Paso,” Nazaryan wrote. “Years later, he would say that the film had inspired him to join Border Patrol. If that’s the case, it’s a little like entering the hospitality industry after watching ‘The Shining.’” (Susan Cowger, Dallas) In The Los Angeles Times, Gustavo Arellano asserted that Trump’s reappraisal of some immigration enforcement activities means nothing if Stephen Miller retains his job and sway: “Keeping him in power is like performing surgery and knowingly leaving a cancerous tumor behind.” (Sandra Smith, Ramona, Calif.) In The Times, Maureen Dowd reacted to Trump’s outrageously racist portrayal, in a social media post, of the Obamas as apes: “It seems etymologically, metaphysically, geologically and ethically impossible that President Trump could reach a new low. But he has.” (John Hurley, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and Alex Vennebush, Orange, Calif., among others) Also in The Times, Michelle Cottle charted the munificence of Trump’s benefactors, who shower him with gaudy tributes: “This is America. People have a God-given right to flush their money down whatever gold-plated toilets they choose.” She also envisioned a future landscape “cluttered with Trump-branded turnpikes, rivers and dams stretching from the Gulf of Trump to the Golden Trump Bridge.” (Betty Clement, Paris, Texas, and Linda Mancini, Florence, Italy, among others) In The Times of London, Kevin Maher identified the tongue’s importance to the director and writer Emerald Fennell’s new movie adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi: “Fennell’s main directorial note to Elordi seems to have been, ‘Great, but can you also lick it?’ And so with titter-inducing idiocy this Heathcliff ‘erotically’ licks the wallpaper in Cathy’s bedroom, he licks her cheek when she’s attempting to cry and, worst of all, in a sequence that’s pure David Attenborough, he licks the length of her neck like a gecko working diligently through a string of dried crickets.” (Nancy Loe, San Luis Obispo, Calif.) In The Atlantic, Josh Tyrangiel marveled at the mundanity of many business leaders’ discussions of A.I.: “After a rollout that could have been orchestrated by H.P. Lovecraft — ‘We are summoning the demon,’ Elon Musk warned in a typical early pronouncement — the A.I. industry has pivoted from the language of nightmares to the stuff of comas. Driving innovation. Accelerating transformation. Reimagining workflows. It’s the first time in history that humans have invented something genuinely miraculous and then rushed to dress it in a fleece vest.” (Judy Riola, Venice, Fla., and Russell Pittman, Takoma Park, Md., among others) Also in The Atlantic, Sally Jenkins schooled the scolds who questioned the 41-year-old skier Lindsey Vonn’s decision to compete in the Winter Olympics despite a rebuilt knee, a torn A.C.L. and the possibility of further injury: “Exactly what did they think downhilling was if not a dangerous flirtation with crackup, a headlong battle against not only the race clock but also the one that, over years, erodes your bones and joints? This was Vonn saying, No thank you. I’d rather do a number on myself than let that bastard Time do it to me." (Drew Lindsay, Alexandria, Va.) In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Cathal Kelly watched Snoop Dogg take center stage at the Games: “He carried the torch. He curled. He was bouncing around Milan like a mobile jewelry store.” (Jim McCartney, Calgary) And in The Times, Kelly Corrigan recommended watching the Games as a reprieve from the disturbing events and bad news in which our psyches are so often mired: “As you sink into the events, mono-focus. Welcome awe into your frayed being. And don’t miss the Alps. Nature has never looked better than set against the aesthetic poverty of our digital spaces.” (Deborah Gressley, Brooklyn, N.Y.) 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. On a Personal Note
I’ve worn many hats during my career as a journalist — movie critic, religion writer, White House correspondent — but none have led to more wrong ideas about me than my five and a half years reviewing restaurants for The Times. People assume I’m a fabulous cook. I’m an unpredictable one. My ambitions wax and wane. My attentiveness comes and goes. I make idiotic decisions: Once, when the microwave was occupied but I was intent on softening a stick of butter, I placed it — still wrapped in its paper — on one rack of a 425-degree oven and then forgot about it. Until, that is, the smoke detector shrieked and I raced back to a kitchen that looked and smelled nothing like it had just 10 minutes earlier. People also assume that my typical week’s dinners are a sequence of diverse delights. They’re more like a tape loop. Salmon and then chicken. Chicken and then salmon. Chicken again. More chicken still. So when the editors of T Magazine asked me if I’d be up for an in-depth article that involved night after night of eating chicken, I half wondered if they were teasing me. If it were some kind of prank. If they’d surreptitiously installed a nanny cam in my home and were mocking my lack of culinary imagination. But no. They meant it. So I traveled to New York from North Carolina to eat chicken at a hot new restaurant in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, chicken at an ambitious new restaurant near Wall Street in Manhattan, chicken keeping company with stuffed cabbage in a cast iron vessel, chicken bedecked with cubes of foie gras-flavored bread. Chicken says so much about a chef’s talent and a kitchen’s discipline. In heedless hands, it’s overcooked. In lazy ones, it’s boring. Or it can be overwhelmed by accents and accessories that broadcast a restaurant’s insecurities, its inability to trust itself to produce a bird that can fly largely on its own. And what does chicken say about the diners who flock to it? That’s one of many questions I tackle in the T Magazine article, which examines the prevalence — and shockingly high prices — of chicken entrees in fashionable restaurants: In some customers’ minds, ordering the chicken demonstrates financial restraint and mitigates the indulgence of the rest of the meal, and that belief persists despite chicken’s upgrade at restaurants where, say, the pork, trout and maybe even salmon are cheaper. Ordering the chicken demonstrates dietary restraint too — it’s less fatty and caloric than red meat. “There are four options,” says Ina Garten, explaining how she winds up with chicken more often than any other restaurant main. “There’s fish, and after I eat fish, I’m hungrier than before I ate fish. There’s pasta, and after I eat pasta, I hate myself, so that’s not going to work. There’s steak, and that’s a once-in-a-while thing. And then there’s chicken — what else is there?” What else indeed? Maybe Ina (who’s a friend, so I can call her that) has the nanny cam trained on me. Which could be a lifesaver, given my flammable relationship with butter. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.
|
