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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.
Everywhere I turn, people are rightly laboring to sound the alarm about Donald Trump’s spectacularly reckless, deeply evil expectorations — like his remark that if a NATO ally weren’t pulling its financial weight, he might encourage Russia to invade it.
The problem is that we’ve run out of sirens.
And that’s not principally because we used them too often in the past — though we’re somewhat guilty of that. It’s because the examples of Trump’s moral perversity are pretty much infinite. How can we not exhaust our storehouse of warnings and our vocabulary of censure when someone suggests suspending the Constitution, muses about executing a military general who’s not lap-dog enough, mocks Paul Pelosi’s head injuries from a hammer-wielding assailant, exhorts and then idolizes insurrectionists, weaves ludicrous lies to reject election results and undermine democracy, and sends political Valentines to despots the world over?
We do our best, but finding words for worse than worst, a marker that Trump passed long ago, stumps us. And there’s no adequate showcase for them. Our society needs front pages beyond the usual front pages, superlatives beyond our superlatives, a thesaurus to supplement our thesaurus. Trump tests more than our sanity and surviving optimism. He tests the very limits of language.
Demagogue, autocrat, dictator, tyrant — so many of us have used and reused those terms, with good reason, to describe what he is or wants to be. So when his malevolence metastasizes (see how hard a writer must strain), what’s left to say? That hasn’t been said before? When you’ve been dwelling at Defcon 1, there’s no new emergency declaration for Americans deaf to Trump’s con.
The usual pejoratives don’t cut it. Take “hypocrite.” It shortchanges the magnitude of Trump’s double standards and disingenuousness. He hectored those NATO countries about not paying their bills, but he’s infamous for not paying his own. He chided Nikki Haley for casting her defeat in the New Hampshire primary as a kind of victory, but he cast his defeat in the presidential election as both a victory and a conspiracy.
He faulted Haley’s husband, who’s doing military service, for his absence on the campaign trail, but his own spouse, who’s doing nothing of the kind, is scarcer than the yeti. Michael Haley is in fatigues; Melania Trump is merely fatigued. Doesn’t deter Donald. Can a hypocrite attain frequent-flier status, like Diamond on Delta? Trump earned it long ago.
I’ve always maintained that his superpower is his shamelessness: It means that he’ll go places competitors wouldn’t dare to — they’re restrained by this musty and quaint quality known as decency. But it also means that his taunts, tirades, insults and inanities are so legion that they blur together. No one of them stands out properly or sticks around. Each has too much competition, too much company.
We in the world outside of MAGA aren’t so much culpable of crying wolf as we are foiled, at this point, by the challenge of capturing the wolf’s madness and appetite. President Biden struggled with that on Tuesday. Responding to Trump’s NATO nuttiness, he noted that “no other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator.” “For God’s sake,” he added, “it’s dumb, it’s shameful, it’s dangerous, it’s un-American.”
That’s a stern condemnation — but is there an adjective or idea in it that hasn’t been thrown at Trump before? I bet that Biden’s lament washed over many Americans, some of whom will later wonder why he isn’t more forcefully denouncing Trump.
We’re all muddling through this together.
Well, not all of us: Trump is conducting an experiment in unbound narcissism with no room for anybody else. It’s bonkers, it’s unscrupulous, it’s terrifying. Pick your put-down. It won’t be sufficiently heard because it won’t be remotely fresh.
In The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe appraised some of the posher precincts of England’s capital: “Take a stroll around Belgravia or Regent’s Park, and you’ll notice that many of the multimillion-dollar dwellings stand unoccupied, their blinds drawn. Here is a safe deposit box for some tycoon in a turbulent industry; there is an insurance policy for a corrupt minister of mines. London is the capital of pristine facades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is literally whitewash.” (Thanks to Beth McCauley of Chapel Hill, N.C., for spotting this.)
In The Los Angeles Times, Julia Wick pondered the incongruity of right-wingers, in their pique at the partnership of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, rooting for the 49ers, who represent a place they typically malign. “The new love for San Francisco,” Wick wrote, “is particularly surprising given how the city is typically depicted on the airwaves of Fox News and other conservative outlets: as a putative Sodom and Gomorrah, where the streets are coated with feces and fentanyl, and good old fashioned American values come to die (but only after they’ve donned a nice leather harness and marched in Pride).” (Chris Wheatley, Port Ludlow, Wash., and Lawrence Dietz, Los Angeles)
In Slate, Justin Peters complained that having Martin Scorsese direct a commercial for Squarespace — as he did for a spot that aired during the Super Bowl — was “like hiring Thomas Pynchon to fill out your grocery list.” (Thomas Beck, Dorado, P.R.)
In The Washington Post, Rachel Tashjian explained that the “cottagecore movement” revolves around “the dream of the beautiful but not overly fussy home, where the internet is, like a city to a country mouse, a place you just visit from time to time for good cheese.” (Regina Tracy, Georgetown, Mass.)
Also in The Post, Ron Charles slogged through “The Book of Love,” a new novel by Kelly Link: “When essential revelations finally arrive on page 422, Laura says, ‘I don’t know why you couldn’t have explained all of this right at the start.’ I wanted to hug her.” (John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)
And George Will lambasted lawmakers for their antics: “Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the very model of the legislator-as-spouter, says: ‘If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.’ Actually, Congress governing would make news.” (Hank Durkin, Charlotte, N.C.)
In The Toronto Star, Vinay Menon appraised the MAGA king’s hold on his subjects: “If Trump told his supporters Bigfoot just swiped his wallet outside a Burger King, millions of red hats would pile into jeeps and fan out across the Pacific Northwest with flashlights and shotguns. If Trump asked Marjorie Taylor Greene to surgically remove her arms and legs, her torso would be glued to a skateboard as she somehow still put her foot in her mouth.” (Lori Jamison, Vancouver B.C.)
On the electoral-vote.com website, Christopher Bates asserted that Ronald Reagan, in contrast to Trump, had a “fundamental decency” reflected in a sense of humor: “Trump couldn’t make a joke if you spotted him a chicken and a road.” (Lee Semsen, Richland, Wash.)
In The Times, Robert Draper explained that “the surest means of ascent in the Trump White House lay in demonstrating your loyalty to the boss, often by demonstrating someone else’s disloyalty, a ritual of backslapping followed by back-stabbing.” (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)
Also in The Times, Ernesto Londoño had some double-entendre fun with the last three words of this sentence: “A survey found that 44 percent of adults aged 19 to 30 said in 2022 that they had used cannabis in the past year, a record high.” (Dana Woodaman, Portland, Ore.)
James Poniewozik examined Jon Stewart’s riff, during his return to “The Daily Show,” about Biden’s and Trump’s ages: “It was not exactly the most daring, outside-the-box topic. Stewart, who has adopted a plant-based diet, apparently has a particular taste for low-hanging fruit.” (Dorit Suffness, Dallas)
And Alex Traub recalled the density of letters, lines and numbers on long, rectangular slide rules, which “looked almost comically abstruse, as if they might be used as paddles in the hazing rituals of a math fraternity.” (Scott A. Singer, Chappaqua, 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.
I occasionally share pictures of my beloved dog, Regan, and often, in the process, refer to our long walks in the woods near our house. But I seldom show you much of those woods. Here’s a glimpse, provided by my friend and Duke colleague Judith Kelley, who joins us from time to time and was with us on Saturday morning, when we logged about six miles.
That ribbon of water is Bolin Creek, a beloved waterway that snakes through the North Carolina towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, its breadth and depth changing markedly with the weather. During a dry spell, some stretches of the creek near me are reduced to mere puddles, and I panic: Could it go away entirely? Evaporate forevermore?
But after heavy rains, the creek does an estimable imitation of a full-fledged river. The water rushes so fast and loud that it almost seems eligible for rafting, and I can’t cross it in some of the places I usually do, because the stones I use for steps are fully submerged. Unlike Regan, I’m not willing to wade or swim to the other side.
Elsewhere along the creek I use thick, broad utility pipes as bridges, imagining myself some Simone Biles on the balance beam — if Biles were about four times as heavy and the beam about six times as wide. The other day, when a thick mist had turned everything in the woods slick, I came upon and began to cross a pipe narrower than some of the others just as a group of schoolchildren on a nature expedition appeared. They paused to watch me.
“No way he makes it,” one of them said.
“This is going to be good,” said another.
A third just laughed.
I was petrified — not of falling, which would have done nothing worse than leave me soaked and muddy, but of embarrassing myself in front of the youngsters, of confirming their assumptions about an old man’s unsteadiness and vulnerability.
Because that, I got the sense, was how they saw me — old, unfit, maybe a bit delusional about his balance and strength.
I channeled Biles and I tensed my core and I paid careful attention to my footwork and I prevailed. A man doesn’t have to be at his peak to manage the task at hand. It’s enough sometimes to be determined.
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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