When it comes to Donald Trump, House Republicans do a convincing pantomime of love. Many of them chirpily parrot his lies. Most of them merrily launder his misdeeds. They grovel for his favor, gush about getting his endorsement and speak and vote in line with his desires.
They’re half partisan, half courtesan.
But there’s heartache underneath. Misery, even. That’s the truth of the Trump era, and that’s the moral of the 2024 exodus from Congress.
More than two dozen House Republicans, along with more than two dozen House Democrats, have headed or are headed for the exits, but the largeness of those numbers — which track with those in other election years over the past decade — don’t tell the story. What matters is who those Republicans are, the disgust in their goodbyes, their palpable sense of defeat and how it contradicts the fact that they have been in the majority in the chamber since early 2023.
In power, they have found themselves close to powerless. That’s the hellish paradox of their surrender to Trump.
For many of them individually, his blessing is the best or only way to maintain support among their Republican constituents back home and win election. But for the lot of them, he’s a curse, because he has contributed mightily to a degrading and dysfunctional culture on Capitol Hill.
Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and other banes of a serious, half-serious or even quarter-serious Republican lawmaker’s existence are Trump’s spiritual spawn. He begot their antics. He nurtured their rage. If being a House Republican has become unbearable, he bears critical responsibility for that.
The Trump giveth, and the Trump taketh away.
Five of the Republicans who decided to escape the Hill’s poisonous climate didn’t or won’t even wait until the end of this year and finish out their terms. They can’t flee fast enough.
Among them is Representative Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican. “This place just keeps going downhill,” he told reporters, “and I don’t need to spend my time here.” You say that kind of thing about a rundown bar where there’s no eradicating the stench of spilled beer. He was talking about a broken-down institution that reeks of abandoned principles.
It’s losing longtime Republican leaders estranged from and spurned by greener, meaner MAGA hellions. Kevin McCarthy, who was the House speaker for less than 10 months last year, has already resigned and is gone. Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who served as a temporary speaker after McCarthy, won’t seek re-election.
They carry the scars of a scabrous 2023. Such was the Republican infighting that McCarthy’s ascent to House speaker required an unprecedented 15 roll call votes — and then he was ousted after the third-shortest speakership in history.
In a profoundly depressing analysis in The Times, Carl Hulse called 2023 “one of the most tumultuous and unproductive legislative years in recent memory.” Vital bills languished. Bedlam prevailed. Representative Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, said that McCarthy had purposely elbowed him in the kidney. “And then I chased after him,” he proudly reported. Zygotes behave more maturely.
“It was historical and hysterical,” Representative Steve Womack, an Arkansas Republican, said at the time. McHenry called it “a very actively stupid political environment.”
Now, its fruits. “Four G.O.P. committee chairs are leaving,” Marianna Sotomayor wrote in a roll call of the Republican refugees in The Washington Post last weekend. “Eight lawmakers are retiring from the coveted Energy and Commerce Committee, and eight subcommittee chairs are leaving.”
Sotomayor quoted Buck as saying: “The populist wave has eroded the conservative values that I had when I came to this place. Now, we’re impeaching people like it’s some kind of carnival, and the Constitution is just a thing of the past to the very same people who were tea party patriots 10 to 12 years ago.”
A carnival ethos. Contempt for the Constitution. Call to mind any former president you know?
In terms of the Republican Party’s devolution over the past dozen years, there can be genuine debate: Which came first, the tempest or the Trump? But it’s indisputable that he worsened the weather. Perhaps he swept in on storm clouds already formed. But only then came the lightning.
And now they seek shelter — McCarthy, McHenry, Buck and so many more. They weren’t built for the apocalypse. They should have done more to head it off.
For the Love of Sentences
The writer Gary Shteyngart spent a week on the Icon of the Seas, billed as the biggest cruise ship ever, and his account in The Atlantic was a prose buffet from which many of you plucked morsels. “The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally,” he wrote. “It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots.” Also: “There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy.” (Thanks to Melissa Guensler of Fredericksburg, Texas, and Pam Vetter of Austin, Texas, among many others, for spotlighting Shteyngart’s article.)
In The Santa Barbara Independent, Zak Klobucher marveled at one of Bruce Springsteen’s live performances: “He carped so much diem that when he called on the audience, ‘Can you feel the spirit?’ Robin Williams showed up to ask him to take it down a notch.” (Mark Flannery, Fullerton, Calif.)
In The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, James Lileks described his attempt to use a snowblower as a slush blower: “I pushed it into the drift, and it was like trying to eat a thick, wet pillow with your dentures out.” (Marie McGeehan, St. Louis)
In The Financial Times, Anjana Ahuja questioned the potential of a new meat: “With half the U.K. population reporting anxiety about snakes and about one in 50 harboring a phobia, the idea of snakes as the new livestock of choice might not have legs.” (Lois Russell, Somerville, Mass.)
In The Times, Wesley Morris appraised Larry David: “I’ve never seen any actor with David’s grasp of how to play skepticism for laughs. Eyebrows as up-yanked drawbridge, forehead creases as lasagna of vexation. That rawboned voice of his soars, if not in octaves, then certainly with tickly, prickly dynamism.” (Carol Ball, Boston, and Annie Stamford, Philadelphia, among many others.) I was as taken with this bit of Wesley’s about “Curb Your Enthusiasm”: “It presents the American id at war with its puritanical superego. Sometimes Larry is the one. Sometimes he’s the other. The best episodes dare him to inhabit the two at once, heretic and Talmudist.”
Also in The Times, Kevin Roose gave thanks for Andres Freund, a Microsoft employee who might have prevented a major cyberattack: “In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a back door in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply.” (Paul Frame, Long Island City, N.Y., and Meg Smith, Old Saybrook, Conn., among others)
Ezra Dyer paid tribute to an automotive throwback, the Dodge Challenger Black Ghost: “It’s a stupid car, really, peak mouth-breather, screaming of wretched excess. But its analog mechanical brutality activates some primal lobe deep in our brains, the one that catalyzes noise into adrenaline. The final V-8 Challenger rolled off the line on Dec. 22 last year, another dinosaur obliterated by the E.V. asteroid.” (Gerry O’Brien, Goderich, Ontario)
And Christopher Kuo reported on a gang of museum robbers less polished than their serial heists suggest: “In court records and interviews, they come across as more 7-Eleven than Ocean’s Eleven.” (Gary Carter, Winston-Salem, N.C., and Miriam Bulmer, Mercer Island, Wash., among others)
In The London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann took pointed issue with some right-wing warriors: “It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action,’ and that is shock and awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it.” (William Wood, Edmonton, Alberta)
And in The Atlantic, David Frum remembered the death of Miranda, his daughter, in her early 30s: “For me, the thought of my own death has never been a distressing subject. We live, we love, we yield the stage to our children. I hoped that when the time arrived, I would have the chance for farewells. If that wish were granted, I could with total content ride the train to my final destination. It never occurred to me that one of my children might board the train first, pulling away as her parents wept on the platform.” (Howard Yegendorf, Ottawa)
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.
What I’m Reading, Writing and Doing
My pooch partiality perhaps makes me the wrong judge, but I had a blast reading an advance copy of “Dogland: Passion, Glory and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show,” by Tommy Tomlinson, which will be published on April 23. It’s more than a behind-the-curtain look at that storied competition. It examines the history, absurdities, vanities and poignancy of our relationships with dogs, at times making the case that they’ve trained us every bit as much as we’ve trained them.
As someone who has written the kinds of articles that fetishize and make much fuss about food, I appreciate counternarratives that puncture all that pretension. Peter C. Baker’s “The Case Against ‘Good’ Coffee,” published in The Times Magazine, does precisely that, with abundant style and sense.
If you aren’t aware of and haven’t been reading The Point, a relatively new blog in Times Opinion, please check it out. It’s a showcase of quick takes by columnists and other Opinion writers and editors. I recently contributed this post about some Democrats’ complaints that other Democrats are being unduly alarmist about the 2024 election.
I’m excited to be onstage with David Axelrod at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics at lunchtime on Friday, April 26, for a conversation about my new book, “The Age of Grievance,” that doubles as a live taping of his “Axe Files” podcast. Registration details here. I’ll discuss the book with Katie Couric at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center in Manhattan on Wednesday, May 1, at 6:30 p.m. Details here. Other cities and events are listed here on my website.
On a Personal Note
There’s a riot outside my bedroom window.
Chirping. Trilling. Cawing. Squawking. I need a thesaurus to do a proper aural inventory. I need noise-canceling headphones to make it go away. But I don’t want to silence or muffle it; it’s an exquisite cacophony, a tapestry of sound that’s perfect, even though it’s all loose threads. I’m nestled in a noisy aviary.
And in a vivid garden. There’s a second riot outside the window, one of color: the pinkish blossoms of a tree whose pedigree I keep forgetting, the red and white flowers spread like frosting atop a hedge of azaleas, the purple fringes of my redbud trees. Early April is when spring struts the most flamboyantly here in my area of North Carolina. The Duke campus is positively Edenic.
And it’s scrambling my relationship with the seasons. I’ve always been an autumn guy — and, for the most part, still am. It’s hard to argue with those colors and with the delicious bite of the air in early November.
But now that I have a house and a yard with yellow daffodils that showed up like an advance guard more than a month ago, pink and red camellias that followed fast on their heels and a cherry tree that peaked for a few glorious mid-March days, I’m wondering if spring has the edge. There are no leaves to collect (though there is the green pollen spreading across my screened porch). No frigid hints of the winter to come.
And there are all these chattering birds! I know that they’re talking with one another, but I like to pretend they’re speaking to me. They’re telling me that amid all the ugliness these days, there’s ample beauty.
The post Republicans Are Fleeing the Stench of a Rotten Congress appeared first on New York Times.