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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.
“He reserves fear for one person, Melania Trump.” That’s what Kellyanne Conway said about Donald Trump in her testimony before a congressional committee in 2022. But is that really true? Looking at the Trumps, I can’t tell. But then we don’t get to look at them all that much — not the two of them together. Melania is often off on her own.
“At the end of the day, she could probably make or break him.” That’s what Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former press secretary, said about Melania to Katie Rogers of The Times this week. But is that because Melania has command of his heart or of his secrets? It’s a mystery, like so much about their marriage and about the former first lady herself.
Melania was tugged back into the news this week as her husband went on trial in Manhattan on charges stemming from his supposed dalliance with the porn star Stormy Daniels. Journalists wanted to know what Melania Trump was thinking. The judge presiding over the trial said that she could theoretically be called to testify.
And Donald Trump fumed to reporters that the trial might prevent him from joining Melania at the high school graduation of their son, Barron, on May 17.
“I was looking forward to that graduation with his mother and father,” Trump said, making a Gotrocks family sound like a Rockwell one. Who knows? Maybe they have cozy moments of closeness invisible to us. Maybe he’s just seizing another opportunity to play the martyr. In this case, the truth really is opaque.
All these years and tweets and town halls and tirades since he came down that infernal escalator, there’s still stuff that we don’t know about a man who is, paradoxically, perhaps the greatest exhibitionist ever to reach the pinnacle of American politics. He over-shares his every absurd irritation and eccentric rumination. He is forever beseeching us to look at him, look at him, look at him.
But his life with his family — his feelings about his family — are something we can’t see. And that blind spot is a significant part of what can make him seem so inhuman.
His predecessors in the White House had their own family dramas. Can we talk about Bill and Hill? But in President Clinton’s voice and eyes — when he spoke of Hillary, when he looked at Chelsea — there were genuine sorrow for the screw-ups and a whole riot of raw emotions. His lack of discipline wasn’t a lack of heart.
George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s interactions with their wives and daughters were suffused with a palpable tenderness.
But when Trump talks about Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr.? Even as he praises them, he seems really to be complimenting himself. And he uses the same stock phrases, the same braggart’s diction, the same isn’t-my-life-enviable boilerplate with which he discusses his foreign policy, his economic record, his golf resorts, his crowds. It could be A.I.-generated: ChatDJT.
Are his family members’ meanings to him more ornamental than sentimental? Again, I can’t tell. It’s possible that Ivanka’s emphatic exit from his political life wounds him greatly and that Don Jr.’s clinging presence touches him deeply. It’s possible that he views them as transactional figures, making decisions based entirely on their own immediate interests — apples fallen close to the tree.
And Melania? How much does she matter to him, and vice versa? I draw no conclusions because I accept the adage that nobody outside a marriage has any firm grasp of what goes on inside it. And she gives away nothing, a paragon of inscrutability. She disappears, she reappears, she wears a jacket with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” scrawled across the back.
The trial that began with jury selection on Monday is in part an excavation of Donald Trump’s private life, as lawyers argue over, and the judge rules on, whether certain details about his reputed infidelities are relevant. But there’s much that these proceedings won’t bring to the surface.
Is Melania far away because she’s disgusted with him, and does he feel at least pinpricks of hurt and worry about that? Those answers remain buried beneath thick layers of bluster, spin and conjecture, and my own guess is that both Trumps prefer it that way.
In The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang questioned the putative ideological diversity of some panels on TV news programs: “Beaming in the famed Never Trump Republican George Conway via livestream for a six-minute segment might be nice on its own merits, but if the idea is for him to stand in for ‘the right,’ it’s a bit like asking a Michael Jackson impersonator to fill in for an injured shortstop because they’re both performers with gloves.” (Thanks to Bill Storandt of Branford, Conn., and Michael Lowenthal of Boston, among others, for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank mulled Donald Trump’s likening of himself to Nelson Mandela: “Trump should stick with the Mandela comparison. After all, the similarities are uncanny! Mandela led the African National Congress. Trump led white nationalists to attack Congress. Mandela did 18 years of hard labor on Robben Island. Trump made the hard decisions for 14 seasons on ‘The Apprentice.’ Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk for abolishing apartheid. Trump won both the Club Championship trophy and Senior Club Championship trophy at Trump International Golf Club.” (Florence Mui, Vancouver, British Columbia)
In her newsletter Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson observed that the near-total abortion ban approved by the Arizona Supreme Court was written in 1864, when “Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases.” (Mary Ellen Scribner, Austin, Texas)
In The Times, Dennis Overbye chronicled and captured the magic of a recent marvel without any semantic straining, any verbal excess: “Today, in one of the greatest one-day migrations in history, humans flocked by the millions to a swath of North America that was briefly cast in a shadow of darkness and wonder. They crowded into airplanes, buses and trains, braved traffic jams, and slept in overpriced hotels, in tents and in their cars. For a cosmic moment, they were connected across the millenniums with every other person who has ever experienced an eclipse, witnessing the light die and then be reborn as a dazzling ring.” (Judy Walters, Naperville, Ill.)
Also in The Times, Pete Wells praised a messy, onion-y creation of the “hamburgerologist” George Motz at his new Manhattan restaurant: “This burger tastes like late-night drives into empty downtowns, of cheap beer on boardwalks and wax paper at fly-by-night carnivals, of places where you talk to weird characters you wouldn’t meet in the daytime. The fast-food chains pushed all of this out of their franchises. Mr. Motz’s Oklahoma burger brings it back. It tastes like honest American grease.” (Toni Barnhart, Hilo, Hawaii, and Jill H. Pace, North Bethesda, Md.)
David French shared this wise insight: “The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we simply don’t know who we are — or what we truly believe — until our values carry a cost.” (Ben Harding, Boulder, Colo.)
And Esau McCaulley shared this one: “Parents can only make deposits of joy. We cannot control when our children will make the withdrawals.” (Helen C. Gagel, Evanston, Ill. )
In The Atlantic, Brian Klaas pondered a paradox: “Government officials are deemed simultaneously too inept to manage, say, health care administration, and omnipotent enough to execute a complex global conspiracy involving a cabal of thousands without any mistakes or leaks. (Call it ‘Schrodinger’s Bureaucrat.’)” (David Director, Media, Pa., and David Mercer, Seattle)
In Bloomberg, Sarah Green Carmichael identified an oddity (to say the least) about medical insurance: “The majority of one’s health care spending happens after retirement. And Medicare doesn’t cover dental or vision care, because in the U.S. health care ‘system,’ teeth and eyes are a bit like checked luggage or an in-flight meal — an optional upgrade for those who choose to splurge.” (Cherie Little, Bellingham, Wash.)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Shannon Proudfoot groaned at the version of Canada’s leader she encountered in one of his recent appearances: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on the first sentence of his first answer at the public inquiry into foreign interference when it became clear that, uh oh, he’d summoned That Guy. You know the guy: Ask him a factual question and the response is a purring, generic values statement so distantly related to the original question they could legally get married.” (Hugh Murray, Cobourg, Ontario, and James Russell, Ottawa)
And in Esquire, Mark Warren plumbed the cruelties of our digital age: “The story of the internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure.” (Chris Knight, Seattle)
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.
The conspiratorial mind-set and anti-government fury of today’s far right aren’t fresh phenomena. They’ve been building for some time. That’s one of the chilling morals of an important new HBO documentary, “An American Bombing,” that re-examines Timothy McVeigh’s destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Available to stream on Max, it’s a trip into the past that’s also a rendezvous with the present and a warning about the future. I hope viewers take heed.
Are Americans experiencing Trump amnesia? I ask in the context of polling that shows a surprising percentage of them remembering Trump’s presidency as a “mostly good” time. I wrote a post about this for the Times Opinion blog, The Point; as it happens, that same day The Morning newsletter also looked at the Trump “nostalgia bump.”
Before I went to see “Civil War” last weekend, I must have read more than a dozen reviews and feature stories about it, but I somehow didn’t fully register that journalists were at the center of the movie.
Yes, it’s a hellish vision of the United States gone to bloody pieces, and it’s concerned above all with what could happen if we didn’t keep our rivalries, recriminations and automatic weapons in check. But it’s told through the eyes and actions of four journalists trying to make their way from New York to Washington and chronicling the mayhem and corpses en route.
And it asks two familiar, arguably tired questions about the writers and photographers who routinely come face to face with the worst of human nature. Do we become scarily numb to it? So that we in fact lose a bit of our own humanity, unable to take proper moral and emotional inventory of what we see?
Interestingly, another popular, enduring question about journalists — one that Donald Trump’s defenders constantly raise — is almost the opposite of that one. Are we too invested, our rooting interests warping our coverage of events? Do we fail to take our own biases and beliefs out of the equation?
My answers to the above are as muddled and unsatisfying as much of the rest of life.
I have indeed met fellow journalists who are all scar tissue and stone — though I can’t say for sure that they weren’t that way at the start. I have met as many journalists who are achingly vulnerable, their unflagging sensitivity the very engine of their efforts.
I know journalists who are intensely ethical about — and committed to — identifying and adjusting for any prejudices they might harbor. I know journalists whose convictions are simply too deep and strong to allow that.
And I know journalists whose careerism overrides all of those dynamics.
Journalists: We’re people, not abstractions. Like everybody else.
Our profession is an essential, honorable one, and I believe that it includes a disproportionate share of civic-minded idealists. But of course it attracts all kinds. And the movies that seek grand truths about us are on a fool’s errand. There are many truths about us, only some of them grand.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book "The Age of Grievance" and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram • Threads • @FrankBruni • Facebook
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