Who could have imagined it? That Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of all peacocks would commit an egregious error in judgment, display a complete lack of professionalism and be sloppy enough to divulge war plans in a group chat that included a prominent journalist?
Sure, there were reports of Hegseth’s gross mismanagement of the veterans’ groups that he once led. There were accusations of public drunkenness and a violent temper. But how many of the men who previously held his job could rock a bright blue suit the way he did? Or pose shirtless to such fetching effect?
What he lacked in rectitude he made up for in pulchritude. Give that man a big say in miliary operations and a Signal account. What could possibly go wrong?
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s immunity inanity — I mean, no one saw that coming. When the Senate held hearings on his fitness to be the secretary of health and human services, he assured lawmakers that his vaccine denialism was overstated. That his views were measured. That his words and deeds would be cautious.
Then came a measles outbreak in western Texas and he sagaciously decreed: Hey, this isn’t a failure of inoculation. It’s a failure of diet. If those sickly children were just eating better — and maybe taking some cod liver oil — they’d be superheroes resistant to these vestigial viruses. And bird flu? Here’s a thought: Let it run rampant through affected flocks. Yes, it might mutate and spread catastrophically among humans, but perhaps we’d glean important insights along the way. Think of the approach as a new, microbiological season of “Survivor,” only with pathogens in the mix and countless lives on the line.
As President Trump’s crackerjack cabinet settles in and unsettles any sentient American, we are not beholding a series of discrete embarrassments and outrages. We are witnessing iterations of the same horror story. Trump chose people for senior administration positions not because they had demonstrated the skills and disposition that those jobs required, not because they had paid their dues, not because they had proven their mettle. He wanted provocateurs. He wanted sycophants. He wanted to test his supporters’ compliance and send his detractors into a tizzy.
Competence didn’t enter the equation, so competence isn’t among the results. He got exactly what he paid for, and now a nation is paying the price.
During a congressional hearing on Tuesday morning, his preposterous director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, preposterously downplayed the security breach of the Signal chat, insisting that none of the information shared was classified. That transparent fiction followed her initial refusal to confirm to lawmakers that she was even a part of the sensitive conversation; she never did tell them whether she’d participated using a personal phone, which would have exacerbated the breach, or a work-issued one.
On Wednesday, she was back before lawmakers, back on defense and armed with a new script: The divulged plans were being shared simultaneously with allies, so, I guess, they weren’t all that juicy a secret. Who could have anticipated such insouciance from Gabbard, a Russia-loving contrarian whose principal qualification for her lofty government position was being so unqualified for it that she’d owe Trump whatever spin his administration wanted, whatever subservience it demanded?
Even members of Trump’s cabinet more credible and seasoned than Gabbard knew the deal: You take the title, you bow before the king. This brings us to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or “Little Marco” as Trump once mockingly (and prophetically) called him. Rubio was supposed to be the (reasonably) safe member of the cabinet — every Senate Democrat joined every Senate Republican in voting to confirm him. They assumed the best. That’s a fatal error in matters Trump-related.
Although Rubio had long been an impassioned advocate of American military support for Ukraine, he watched Trump and Vice President JD Vance gang up on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in that shameful Oval Office meeting, got the message, got out the pompoms and got on Elon Musk’s social media platform to cheer his boss.
“Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before,” Rubio wrote. “Thank you for putting America First.” Junking his principles that merrily and fawningly suggests that he was poised for surrender all along — and that Trump could smell as much.
Hegseth may actually be exceeding Trump’s expectations. His mimicry of Trump is uncanny. After Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist privy to the Signal chat, wrote about the breach, Hegseth simply denied reality, saying, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Goldberg clearly demonstrated otherwise. Hegseth also went on the attack, Trump-style, by smearing Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, as someone who had “made a profession of peddling hoaxes.”
Accusations instead of accountability. Lies in lieu of truth. Should be enough to make Hegseth a lock for Cabinet Member of the Month.
Democrats Didn’t Orchestrate This Mess
There’s no question that the Democratic Party is suffering an identity crisis. There’s no denying its own hand in its current powerlessness. Its leaders failed to appreciate how many Americans they were estranging and ignored the warning signs that President Joe Biden was in no shape to run for re-election.
The party screwed up. And here we are.
But that doesn’t make Democrats responsible for Trump’s contemptuous (and contemptible) dealings with our allies. It doesn’t mean that Democrats get the blame for the current gutting of vital government projects. The assault on scientific research, the anti-science of Kennedy, the antics of Musk — none of that is on Democrats. And yet some of the commentary I read and discussions I hear suggest or communicate as much.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes: If Democrats had been smarter, humbler, more realistic, someone as lawless and lavishly flawed as Trump wouldn’t have found so much traction and reclaimed the presidency mere years after his unconscionable attempt to steal it.
Yes, yes, a million times yes: If the Democratic Party wants to beat back the nefariousness and corruption of Trump and his henchmen, it must unflinchingly examine where it went wrong and own up fully to each and every mistake. A bright American future — and the survival of American democracy — demands as much.
But let us please not lose sight of the fact that while Democratic error helped open the door to Trump, it didn’t compel him to wreak havoc once he sauntered through it. It didn’t foreordain his cruelty and nihilism. He and his team are the agents of the wreckage since his inauguration, each bit of it their considered, even gleeful, choice.
Democrats haven’t been able to stop it — yet — mostly because they have only so many levers to pull. You know who has more and better ones? Republicans. They preside over the congressional committees that can investigate wrongdoing. They have a three-seat Senate majority — and have used it to confirm those all-star cabinet members to whom I just paid tribute. They market Trump’s madness as evil genius, getting at least one of those two words right.
The Democratic Party may be one big question mark. But it’s Republicans who must answer for Trump.
What I’m Reading
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After I wrote in my previous newsletter about the balm of poetry, a few of you sent me emails suggesting that I occasionally give a shout-out to a particular poem. Happy to. I mentioned Sylvia Plath last week; I have a special fondness for what most people would consider — and what probably is — a minor poem in “Ariel,” her most lauded collection. It’s the first one, “Morning Song,” and it succinctly, gently and lyrically conveys Plath’s conflicting reactions to new motherhood. Here’s her description of a glance from the baby’s room to the outdoors: “The window square / Whitens and swallows its dull stars.” What an artful way to recognize the dawn.
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Speaking of poems and their analysis: My Times colleague A.O. Scott recently wrote this terrific article about “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” by Adrienne Rich.
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I like reading commentators whose range of opinions doesn’t fit tidily under one political label or into one ideological box. If I can’t guess what, on a given week, they’ll write about, all the better. And I’m delighted if they have a particular lens that’s distinctive. My Times Opinion colleague John McWhorter meets those criteria and then some. His lens is that of a linguist — he’s a professor of linguistics at Columbia — and it informs his new book, “Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words,” which will be released on Tuesday. Yes, it weighs in on pronoun politics, but it also travels well beyond that, on a route reflecting John’s curiosity, erudition and wit.
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A wise writer doesn’t let special vantage points go to waste, and a former Duke student of mine, Taylor Plett, didn’t. Her internship at Neon — an especially hot indie film production and distribution company — intensified all the movie talk around her and stirred the intriguing observations about “film bros” that she makes in this insightful article in GQ.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times. A.O. Scott captured the spirit of our conspiracy-friendly times, in which so many Americans are “epistemological free agents, making up the world as we blunder through it”: “Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” (Thanks to Charles Kelley of Merrimack, N.H., and Trisha Houser of Durham, N.C., among others, for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Megan Stack identified Las Vegas as “a town full of glitter but grounded in dust.” (Jordan M. Corn, Hamilton, N.J.)
Margaret Renkl observed that America had responsible vaccination rates before “the internet deluded people into believing that an online search was commensurate with a medical degree.” (Tony Marion, Memphis)
And Kwame Anthony Appiah pushed back at someone who complained about a friend who started identifying as “queer” while in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. “A side eye for the queer guy?” Kwame asked. He added, “You’ve somehow decided that your friend’s self-presentation is merely a flex — that his makeover is an opportunistic rebrand. In the rarefied social world you share, it seems, straight desire has become the love that dare not speak its name, and fauxmosexuals must be outed as the clout-chasers they are.” (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass., and Sandra Boots, Chevy Chase, Md.)
In The Washington Post, George F. Will traced Trump’s trajectory: “Trump lost in 2020 because voters, weary of a political diet consisting of huge dollops of turmoil smothered in a gravy of malice, thought Joe Biden promised tranquillity. Trump won in 2024 partly because Biden whisperers convinced him that voters craved high-octane progressivism, from trillion-dollar spending tranches to innumerable pronouns.” (Robert Dowd, Tacoma, Wash., and Dan Conrad, Jasper, Ind.)
Also in The Post, Kara Voght beheld Karoline Leavitt: “Trump’s newest press secretary is radiant, blond and apple-cheeked — as if one of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonnas had been styled for a Fox News hit.” (Jonathan Weker, Montpelier, Vt.)
And Philip Bump mapped the cosmos of Trump: “So much of what orbits the president is held in place by the gravitational pull of his insecurity.” (Doug Sterner, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
In The Guardian, Dan Sabbagh noted that while a Trump-brokered cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia faces many obstacles, Trump and Vladimir Putin did agree to a hockey match between Russian and American players: “The puck, at least, does not stop here.” (Anthony Low, Manhattan)
Also in The Guardian, Marina Hyde skewered the Trump administration officials on that Signal chat: “They really should make a darkly satirical TV show about these absurd, degenerate, unpleasant people. Call it ‘The White Potus.’” (Scott Williams, Salt Lake City)
In her newsletter, The Vajenda, Jen Gunter mocked the mind-sets of raw-milk proponents such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Kennedy, who seem unpersuaded by the pasteurization process — invented more than a century ago by the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur — of heating milk to kill certain bacteria and reduce food-borne illness: “Perhaps if I were to rephrase this process and talk about a ‘sacred, ancient French ritual that uses the heat of the hallowed flame to warm ethereal resistance molecules, coaxing them from a deep slumber to create vitality that balances evil humors,’ Paltrow and R.F.K. Jr. and the rest would be all in!” (Jennie Callas, Lake Forest, Ill.)
In The New Yorker, Jaron Lanier copped to a cynical strategy in his tech industry’s vocabulary: “We often speak of A.I. as if it were a person and of people as if they might become obsolete when A.I. and robots surpass them, which, we say, might occur remarkably soon. This type of thinking is sincere, and it is also lucrative. Attention is power in the internet-mediated world we techies have built. What better way to get attention than to prick the soul with an assertion that it may not exist?” (Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)
Also in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik explored a motive behind much storytelling: “We repair the rips in memory’s fabric with the filler of fable.” (Marge Volpe, Rochester, 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.
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