If you listened carefully to President Trump’s disgraceful dressing down of his Ukrainian counterpart in the Oval Office last week, you heard gripes galore, but with one theme above all others: Americans had been played for fools. We’d been suckered, swindled, bamboozled. In all our goodness and glory, we’d forked over hundreds of billions of dollars to Volodymyr Zelensky and received nothing in return — no assurance of victory, no mineral rights, not even a properly flowery thank-you note.
What chumps we were.
If you looked for a through line in Trump’s titanically self-indulgent blathering to Congress on Tuesday night, you saw the same bitterness, the identical complaint about Americans’ treatment by trading partners, by supposed allies, by fraudsters in the federal government, by woke zealots. We could slap giant tariffs on countries that had long taken lavish advantage of us — or we could continue being chumps. We could cheer on Elon Musk as he derailed the gravy train of frivolous government contracts and superfluous federal employees — or we could consign ourselves to chump-ness forevermore.
Trump isn’t simply telling Americans that they haven’t been given their due. He’s insisting that they’ve been duped, and the choice before them is to finally get smart or to continue getting scammed.
The word grievance is frequently attached to what Trump traffics in — I may have used it somewhere myself — but it’s not a perfect fit for the pettiness and puerility of the language he chooses, the stories he promotes and the lessons he identifies. Democratic initiatives that he opposes aren’t just bad decisions. They’re mockeries of common sense, and the politicians pushing them are laughing behind fair-minded Americans’ backs.
Those Democrats not only put a welcome mat at the border but also put migrants up in fancy hotels. They made chumps of the rest of us. Social justice warriors framed critical race theory and offices of diversity, equity and inclusion as necessary correctives for centuries of discrimination when the point of it all was really perks and preferential treatment for minorities. We were chumps to fall for and allow it. But we won’t be falling for it anymore. Trump is the chump antithesis. The chump antidote. A walking, talking, golden-lidded canister of Chump Be Gone.
To make that sale, he exaggerates wildly, lies promiscuously and elevates conspiracy theories, which tend to begin with or circle around to a whole class of people being marked as chumps. The enemy within is rigging elections. Foreign countries are dumping patients from psychiatric hospitals on America. FEMA is diverting taxpayer dollars from disaster relief to migrant coddling.
Those aren’t run-of-the-mill accusations, because run-of-the-mill accusations don’t incite the intensity of anger he wants. Similarly, Joe Biden can’t just be a bad president. He must be the “worst president in American history,” as Trump crazily asserted on Tuesday night, because only then were Americans worse than unlucky. Only then were they out-and-out chumps, forced to submit to a doddering codger whose incapacity was masked by the agents of the Deep State.
Trump presents himself, in contrast, as someone less gullible than all the chumps who preceded him in the White House and who staged such chumpy follies as subsidizing Europeans’ military defense, entering onerous climate pacts and signing supposedly bad trade deals — all of which he railed against in his remarks to Congress.
“We have been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on Earth, and we will not let that happen any longer,” he fumed, grandiosely. That was his justification for his huge tariffs on once-cherished allies. It cast him as the star, director and screenwriter of a movie titled “Revenge of the Chumps.”
Why did he go on so selectively and at such length about instances of debatable foreign aid? So that he could register something rawer than disagreement — so that he could prove that Americans had been taken for a ride. And that ludicrous riff about millions of corpses on the Social Security rolls? It had to be that many minutes long and that scandalously misleading if bureaucratic error were to be repurposed as nefarious plot.
Trump’s version of events and of himself is designed to stir a manner of resentment and magnitude of nastiness that strengthen his most fervent supporters’ allegiance to him by concentrating their hatred of his appointed enemies and sharpening their appetite for revenge.
It reflects his fiercest and most fundamental convictions: that every transaction and relationship is a zero-sum situation in which one party is getting the better of the other, and that if you’re not making a chump of your adversaries, you’re ensuring that they will make a chump of you.
It’s also a trick. It pulls such a thick wad of wool over his followers’ eyes that they’re unlikely to see how Trump — with his richest-ever cabinet, his relentless monetizing of the presidency, his rank nepotism and the conflicts of interests swirling around him — is really the one fleecing the country.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Guardian, David Smith honed a sharp retort to President Trump’s musing that “this is going to be great television” after his tirade against Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office: “Sure. And as they slipped into the icy depths, the captain of the Titanic probably assured his passengers that this would make a great movie some day.” (Thanks to Bill Sclafani of Rockport, Mass., for nominating this.)
On the CNN website, Nick Paton Walsh reacted to Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s apparent belief that Zelensky, “soaked in war’s horror for three years,” needed lessons from them on Ukraine’s losses and the desirability of peace: “Moneyed ignorance loudly lectured exhausted experience.” (Monica Gordon, Slingerlands, N.Y.)
In The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus explored the implications of declining birthrates: “The end of the world is usually dramatized as convulsive and feverish, but population loss is an apocalypse on an installment plan.” (John Braunstein, Lancaster, Penn.)
In The Washington Post, Michael Andor Brodeur examined the phlegmy pox upon his (and other patrons’) listening pleasure. “I get it: Everyone coughs,” he wrote. “But it seems uniquely reserved to the classical concert hall that everyone coughs. Have you folks ever heard of lozenges? They’re great — they help keep you from coughing at inopportune times, or constantly.” (Jill H. Pace, North Bethesda, Md.)
Also in The Post, Philip Bump rolled his eyes at the Trump administration’s theatrical release of supposedly new information about Jeffrey Epstein: “The list of contacts from Epstein’s address book was published by Gawker a decade ago. It was the Fyre Festival of document dumps.” (Stephanie Zarpas, Annapolis, Md.)
And Emily Heil noted that the winner of a French fry taste test seemed “to nail the best qualities of a British period-drama dreamboat: a crisp exterior, but soft inside.” (Rose Kohler, Stamford, Conn.)
In The Times’s Opinion Today newsletter, Spencer Bokat-Lindell channeled Jane Austen to reflect on the odd sleeping habits and arrangements of plutocrats: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an enterprising executive in possession of a multibillion-dollar fortune must be in want of a nap.” (Laurie Wenger, Amherst, N.H.)
Also in The Times, Jamelle Bouie defined Trump as “a man who seems to take the seven deadly sins as a seven-day challenge.” (Michelena Hallie, Amenia, N.Y., and Lisa Butler, Flagler Beach, Fla., among many others)
Maureen Dowd traced the monarch of Mar-a-Lago’s arc: “It turned out that Trump did not need to alter his behavior to be president. He simply altered the presidency to match his personality.” (Danny McKenzie, Hattiesburg, Miss.)
Noah Shachtman questioned the whole sport of horseracing: “Traditionally, racehorses were treated like yachts with saddles, a way for rich people to lose money with style.” Also, he wrote: “Attempts to build Off-Track Betting parlors succeeded in concentrating cigarette butts and human misery but little else.” (Dana Bres, Arlington, Va., and Jim Farrell, Harvard, Mass., among others)
Thomas Gibbons-Neff inventoried the diversifying wares of American gun stores: “Christmas was a few days away and Solomon Lehnerd was selling more grenade launchers than usual.” (Dan Woog, Westport, Conn.)
And Wesley Morris took stock of the “Dune” movies: “When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s ‘Lawry’s of Arabia,’ ‘Lost in Spice.’” In the same article, Wesley described “Conclave” as a “pick-a-pope nail-biter” that “relies on so much shanking that it feels like a prison movie and features more cafeteria grandstanding than ‘Mean Girls.’” (Scott Williams, Salt Lake City, and Daniel Kummer, Brooklyn, among others)
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 and Writing
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As newsletter readers know, I’m fascinated by the creativity and resilience of people with special challenges, and my own experience with diminished eyesight points me in particular toward books by people with visual impairments. There are two significant new ones. “Connecting Dots: A Blind Life,” written by Joshua A. Miele in collaboration with Wendell Jamieson, describes Miele’s extraordinary journey — and professional and personal triumphs — after someone poured acid over his head when he was 4 years old. It was published on Tuesday.
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The second book, “Whale Eyes,” will be published on March 18. It’s by the Times Opinion video producer James Robinson, with illustrations by Brian Rea, and it combines words with pictures to evoke the world as James — who has an eye misalignment known as strabismus — sees it. James traces his path from a childhood in which he was made painfully aware of his differences to his success as a filmmaker, including an Emmy for a documentary about stuttering and an Emmy nomination for a subsequent Times Opinion documentary that presaged “Whale Eyes” and shares its focus and title.
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Is Trump’s command of Americans’ attention some kind of messaging genius or will he (and Musk!) simply exhaust everyone in the end? That’s among several questions that the former Republican strategist Tim Miller, the historian Nicole Hemmer and I pondered in this Times Opinion round table, which was published on Friday. I also contributed to this Times Opinion roundup of writers’ reactions to Trump’s address to Congress.
On a Personal Note
An arc of purple over a band of red atop a ribbon of orange. I think I have the arrangement of those colors right. I know they were all present on the horizon as I drove toward my neighborhood, my car facing west, at dusk on Saturday.
I also know they saved me in a crucial measure at a crucial time.
I’d been enraged for more than 24 hours about the spectacle in the Oval Office the day before, when two smug, supercilious Americans preached etiquette and gratitude to an embattled leader whose own land, through no fault of its own, had been turned into an abattoir. I’d been despondent for more than a month about what often seems to me an outright inversion and perversion of the values that our country long articulated and — genuinely, I think — aspired to.
I was so very sad and so very mad and then, suddenly, something gorgeous. A moment of grace. I’m not religious enough to call it a sign from above (and to be geometrically rigorous and spatially correct, it wasn’t above but rather ahead of me, almost at eye level). But it filled me with a warmth that lingered for many hours afterward.
I know how dopey that may sound. A perfect sunset cures exactly nothing. But it does round out the picture, and it produced a feeling in me no less apt than my despair.
The world and our relationships with one another — personal, political — are overfull of ugliness. But they include beauty, too. And making sure to recognize and revel in it whenever it appears seems to me the essence of wisdom — and the secret to perseverance.
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