If you could smell like any U.S. president, who would it be?
I’d probably avoid anyone from more than a century ago, because we’ve made huge strides in plumbing and access to running water since then, and antiperspirant technology has definitely evolved. I now see roll-ons advertising 72-hour protection. If you’re trusting and testing that promise, please stand at least six feet from me.
And I think Ronald Reagan has the olfactory edge over Richard Nixon. We humans excrete chemicals consistent with our emotions — hence the belief that our dogs can read our distress — and Reagan’s smiling confidence surely had a better bouquet (maybe myrrh and tonka bean) than Nixon’s twitchy resentment (I’m guessing cabbage soup and kerosene).
Before this week, such musings might have seemed off-topic. Now they’re on the nose. On Sunday, Donald Trump digressed from the painstaking policy development, careful vetting of potential staff members and high-minded diplomacy that consume so very much of his time to announce the release of a new line of Trump colognes and perfumes. And so we must wonder: Does the patchouli make the president? Must the leader of the free world also be the leader of the fragrant one?
Like Trump himself, Trump the scent is big on braggadocio, short on details and gaudily packaged. The Trump Fragrance site calls it the Fight Fight Fight Collection (all uppercase, no commas), which it says is for “Patriots Who Never Back Down” and is “Your Rallying Cry In A Bottle.” I’m tempted to order some just for the conversation: “Frank, what is that you’re wearing?” “Why, it’s a rallying cry!”
The site doesn’t say whether Fight Fight Fight men’s cologne and Fight Fight Fight women’s perfume are much different from each other. Or whether they’re different from Victory 47 men’s cologne and Victory 47 women’s perfume, both of which allude to Trump’s situation as the about-to-be 47th president of our odoriferous nation and come in bottles with golden Trump figurines standing tall, speciously chesty and suspiciously svelte atop their caps.
The site also offers little information about the fragrances’ top notes or debased notes — sorry, base notes — so whether you’ll wind up smelling like a Florida flower garden, a New Jersey pine forest or a Washington swamp is a mystery. Could be any of Trump’s habitats!
It’s mute as well about whether Trump spritzes himself with one of these elixirs, so while wearing it presumably means that you’ll pass nasal muster with the king of bluster, it may not match the man’s musk.
The price, however, is unambiguous: $199. That’s almost double an entry-point Hermès. But no French parfum is “curated to capture the essence of success and determination,” per the Trump Fragrance site. No Italian profumo is going to Make America Aromatic Again.
And only Fight Fight Fight and Victory 47 pay tribute to a plutocrat with an insatiable desire to monetize everything about his life in any way possible. To turn political supporters into paying customers and political support into a personal profit center. Not even the honor of the presidency and the dignity once expected of presidents can prevent Trump from presiding over what my Times colleague Katie Rogers aptly called “the churn of a conveyor belt spitting out one Trump product after another.”
I’d swap “spitting” for “belching.” And I’d add that the whole thing, well, reeks.
His products now include Trump acoustic guitars and Trump electric guitars, enabling, I suppose, the playing of Trump folk or Trump heavy metal. They include footwear, coins, crypto, a Trump Bible and “Save America,” a picture book with Trump’s alternate version of American history.
All of those follow in the greedy footsteps of Trump steaks (so you could sup like Trump), Trump ties (so you could swan like Trump) and “The Art of the Deal” (negotiate like Trump). Also Trump University (attain his erudition), which closed amid lawsuits accusing it of fraud. In the end, it had more metaphoric than pedagogical value.
Trump was an influencer before there were influencers. He was a brand before people commonly and crassly began to describe themselves that way. And from the beginning of his first presidential campaign to the present, the political arena has been, in many ways, an exercise in brand extension, a means to maximize his economic potential, a tool for complete cultural domination.
Much has been written about party affiliation as the new religion: You accept its edicts in return for an identity and a community. But party affiliation has also become a lifestyle. It’s where you vacation, what you eat and now, thanks to Trump, how you perform your toilette. If Kamala Harris is really smart about her endeavors on the far side of the vice presidency, she’ll slap her name on a hydrating face serum and de-puffing eye cream. For the Democrat recovering from the stress of 2024.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan recalled her childhood: “My position in the family was that of a suitcase to the traveler. Half of the time it’s an unholy burden, but when you see it thundering back down the luggage chute, you could weep with relief. I was deeply loved, and I was never left behind.” (Thanks to Howard Caro of San Francisco for nominating this.)
Also in The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich assessed President Biden’s decision to pardon his son: “The moral high ground can be overrated real estate.” (Gene Resnick, Manhattan)
In her View From Rural Missouri newsletter, Jess Piper cited foolishness in her own state to defend the necessity of U.S. Department of Education oversight: “I am a witness to the witless.” (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)
In The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr needled the Washington gerontocracy and anti-abortion crusaders in one fell sentence: “Politicians today seem unsure whether life begins at conception or at 80.” (Harry Kloman, Pittsburgh)
In The Irish Times, Dave Hannigan girded for a comeback by Conor McGregor, a bro-culture favorite and one of Ultimate Fighting Championship’s top draws: “Immature fan boys trapped in swollen men’s bodies will fall anew for his tiresome shtick, that odious amalgam of shamroguery and gombeenism, mistaking his cackle for charm, his insults for intellect, his foul-mouthed waggery for wit.” (Michael O’Toole, Dublin)
On the MSNBC website, Michele Norris praised a much-discussed television commercial that shows a Black Mrs. Claus doing all of Santa’s prep for him as “a hat tip to the women who do most of the cooking, cleaning, planning, shopping, organizing, decorating, deconstructing, entertaining, elevating, hand-holding, shipping, wrapping, refereeing and general whirligig sprinting at full tilt, until they can finally kind of, sort of relax on the unofficial Dec. 26 holiday known as ‘don’t ask Mama for a darn thing all day or else you might just get your feelings hurt.’” (Ric Reardon, Rutland, Vt.)
In The Times, John McWhorter wondered why we keep using “guys” in reference to groups that aren’t exclusively male: “We wouldn’t address a room full of men as ‘you girls.’ One reason is that English lacks a warm, relatable word for women. ‘Ladies’ is dainty. ‘Sisters,’ beyond Black English, sounds like nuns. ‘Gals’ is a touch comic and perhaps a tad vintage — a little hair spray and Jell-O molds, to my ear.” (Janet Krueger, Encinal, Texas, and David W. Doskow, Cortlandt Manor, N.Y.)
Also in The Times, Lindsay Zoladz argued that Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” which she named one of the best albums of 2024, transcends its messy sprawl because it’s “like one of those Simone Biles routines where she stumbles and at one point even falls off the beam entirely (‘Jolene,’ ahem), but the level of difficulty, ambition and innovation are all so far above any of her peers that she medals anyway.” (Mark Rosen, New Paltz, N.Y.)
David Waldstein reeled from the New York Mets’ acquisition of the outfielder Juan Soto from the New York Yankees: “It’s hard to convey to the non-baseball fan just how unnatural this feels. It is as if Staten Island stole all the art galleries from SoHo, or the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway became a giant bike lane.” (Bob Schwartz, Atlanta, and Brian Sugrue, Santa Cruz, Calif.)
And Giles Harvey observed that the stories that Alice Munro wrote after she’d learned of (and covered up) her second husband’s sexual abuse of her youngest daughter “are full of violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies.” He added: “That Munro apparently derived these themes from a real-life episode has made her work feel suddenly transparent, as though it has been injected with a contrast dye, revealing zones of private meaning.” (Susan Milord, Rome)
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 Watching
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In last week’s newsletter, I sang the praises of Zoe Saldaña, based on her standout performance in the otherwise disappointing movie “Emilia Pérez.” Then, by chance, I began watching the Taylor Sheridan television series “Lioness” — and there she was! I hadn’t known. She’s its star, playing the leader of a women-powered wing of C.I.A. operatives, and she crucially classes up a show that’s definite fun but also shamelessly repetitive (another pulse-pounding firefight!) and laughably far-fetched. I’ll long remember a scene toward the end of the first of the show’s two seasons in which she wrestles to hold back sobs during a phone call with her children. It’s brilliantly acted — and heartbreaking.
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Last week I also discussed several end-of-year movies that strain to impress audiences. (That’s an award-season affliction.) “Juror #2,” which is streaming on Max (and available elsewhere for a rental fee), tilts in the opposite direction. It’s refreshingly straightforward. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette, it uses a trial with a seemingly forgone conclusion to ponder the slipperiness of truth, the sloppiness of justice and the difficulty of figuring out the right thing when every alternative wrongs someone. It’s not hugely compelling but it’s plenty involving, especially if you go into it without full knowledge of its clever premise.
Retire These Words!
This final section of the newsletter isn’t unimportant.
And that’s a sentence rendered with laudable nuance or pointless affectation — depending on your view of double negatives.
I vote for affectation, and I think double negatives are all too common. But before I say why, I should specify the kind of double negative I mean.
Not “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Not “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” As a terrific article about double negatives on the Merriam-Webster site points out, those famous lyrics — the first from a Rolling Stones song, the second from a Bill Withers classic — aren’t examples of two negatives adding up to a positive, so that the Stones are getting satisfaction and Withers is basking in rays of light. In context, the Stones’ and Withers’s double negatives are clearly matters of slangy emphasis. “No satisfaction” and “no sunshine” proclaim especially painful voids. And the single syllable of “no” grafts onto the music and fits the melodies much better than “any” would.
But “isn’t unimportant” and “not unhappy” are indeed two negatives meant to cancel each other out. They’re affirmatives in drag.
So is an even more prevalent phrase flagged — and loathed — by Doug Suna of Shaker Heights, Ohio. “Please ask pundits, celebrities and many others to drop the expression, ‘You’re not wrong,’” he wrote to me. “Last I checked, ‘you’re not wrong’ means ‘you’re right.’” He added, cheekily: “I know I’m not wrong.”
And yet. “You’re not wrong” isn’t precisely the same as “you’re right,” the latter indicating simple agreement and the former signaling some hesitation, some ambivalence, some uncertainty: You’re not wrong, but I’m not in full agreement with you. Or you have a point among many other, contradictory points. Or there’s no final resolution — no last word — yet, so there’s still time for you to be wrong (and for me to be right!).
“You’re not wrong” is a stinting of credit, a hedging of bets, a refusal to commit. It’s the egg-white omelet to the yolky wholeness of “you’re right,” the flashing yellow light to its steady green.
But why not accomplish that with a qualified positive? As in, ”you’re partly right,” “you may be right” or “you have a point.” Those words are less coy and more generous.
If I’m not unhappy, then I’m reasonably happy or happy enough. I’m OK or good or satisfied. If this discussion isn’t unimportant, then it’s worthwhile or amusing or passably, modestly interesting. At least I hope that’s the case! I’m not unproud.
“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. It appears every few months. Its previous installment, about “word salads,” was in this newsletter.
The post Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks. appeared first on New York Times.
