It’s a hell of a thing to be surrounded by college seniors a month away from heading out into this new America, a land of malice and madness. My fellow professors and I are supposed to have nuggets of optimism at the ready, gauzy and gooey encomiums about infinite possibilities, the march of progress and that apocryphal arc, the one that bends toward justice. But all I’ve got is the metastasizing pit of fear in my own gut.
An unfamiliar student appeared at my office door the other day. Her eyes were red. Watery. It’s pollen season here in North Carolina, but I knew that wasn’t why. She was shopping for some consolation, some inspiration, and I guess my shingle looked as promising as any other.
“Where,” she asked me, “do you find hope?”
I had to stop myself from quipping that I’d sent out a search party but its members hadn’t come back, probably because they’d been wrongly detained at the border. I realized that I was stumped — that I hadn’t yet plotted a path to the far side of anger and sorrow. I owed her one. I remembered all the anxiety and uncertainty I felt at her age, the gnawing suspense of being on the threshold of adulthood with no clue what it had in store for me. I can’t imagine that state of mind and flux of emotions with a political moment like this one thrown into the roiling mix.
It’s at this point that I’m obliged to note that my office is at Duke, that my students have the privilege of attending one of the country’s most selective and affluent universities and that simply getting a college degree, any college degree, gives them a big advantage. In fact, America landed in this mess partly because of the inattention to such divides — financial, educational, cultural — and the perpetuation of rules and rites that coddled and flattered one self-impressed class of Americans while condescending to everyone else. I say that not out of any obligation. I say it because it’s true.
And some of what President Trump is doing is exploding that system, trying to reassemble the American economy in a manner that revitalizes neglected sectors and scrambles the cast of winners and losers. He’s after something analogous with his cultural revolution. Less research, more manufacturing. Fewer experts, more evangelists. Enough with roughage, bring on the beef. Let men be brutes and women be trad wives.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the student at my door and college students throughout the country made all sorts of decisions and nurtured all kinds of expectations based on one version of America only to encounter, less than three furious months into Trump’s second presidency, a much, much different one. It’s a situation suffused with bitter ironies: Those students have often been caricatured and vilified for not seeing enough good in America — for focusing on its betrayals rather than its ideals — and now they’re watching its leader betray those ideals daily, hourly, with a shrug or a smirk or, at least metaphorically, a cackle.
The world is always heaving beneath our feet. We’re the beneficiaries or casualties of its shape at a given moment. But is that what I’m supposed to tell a young woman trying to figure out her place and her plan?
Does it do justice to what she’s witnessing — to the Trump administration’s abandonment of, and indifference to, a man consigned to a hellhole in El Salvador because of an administrative error? To Trump’s morally perverse rewrite of history, in which Ukraine is evil and Russia rightly aggrieved? To his pardoning of the savages who smashed their way into the Capitol and bloodied police officers on Jan. 6, 2021? To his veneration of autocrats and his administration’s fervent efforts to turn him into one? To its conception of power not as a blessing that compels you to be generous but as a bludgeon that allows you to be cruel?
This is not merely a change in the rules. It’s the collapse of decency and dignity.
What will this season’s college commencement speakers say? I’m baffled. I’m also selfishly interested — maybe there are lines in their scripts I can crib. By what political or psychological sleight of hand will they predict a bright future after a spell of darkness? Will they be able to dance around all these chilling omens on a day when they’re supposed to perform an oratorical jig?
Some service-minded students who’d hoped to work for precisely the sorts of agencies and advocacy groups razed by Elon Musk and DOGE are regrouping. So are some science-focused students who’d set their sights on doing important research. They’ll figure out an alternative.
But what’s the fallback for a teetering democracy? That’s what was troubling the student at my door. That’s what I had to address.
I said that her shock at the current turn of events is a reminder that we never know what’s coming next, and while that question mark can be terrifying, it can also be a solace. I said that the unpredictability of the story reflected its many authors, she and I among them. We have by no means reached a point of helplessness, but we will most certainly get there if we declare defeat too soon. Hope isn’t an option. It’s an obligation.
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For the Love of Sentences
Trump has long been a sturdy prompt for colorful prose. But he’s more than that now — a boundlessly gushing font of so much ridicule-ready nonsense that we need many subcategories for those words and deeds. Such as: Trump’s (latest) trade war.
On X, Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, reeled at the Trump administration’s computation of tariff rates without using actual tariff data: “This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science.” (Thanks to Susan Savia of Wilmington, N.C., and Charlie Marion of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., among others, for nominating this.)
In The Daily Beast, David Rothkopf was put in mind of “The Godfather”: “These aren’t tariffs. They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.” (Julie Gaskill, Seattle)
In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson singled out the 50 percent rate initially imposed on Lesotho: “Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.” (Jess Reed, Wagga Wagga, Australia, and Molly Ingle, Dallas, among many others)
Also in The Atlantic, David Brooks homed in on the ruthlessness of it all: “In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart — or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.” (Charles Dinerstein, Laurel, N.Y.)
In The Free Press, Nellie Bowles evaluated Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s tariff-defending complaint that Europeans, in his words, “hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.” “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Bowles wrote. “They hate our beef because of how beautiful our beef is. Our beef, which grazes on shredded Teflon and plastic shower curtains to create a marbling of microplastics. They’re jealous.” (Wendy Holmquist, Fernandina Beach, Fla.)
I’m going to keep going with the Trump administration, just to get it out of our systems. (If only it were that easy.) Next week, I’ll do what I’ve done with this section of the newsletter on a few occasions and declare it a Trump-free zone.
In Mother Jones, Tim Murphy took on Elon Musk’s hypersensitivity and, as a State Supreme Court election last week illustrated, vulnerability: “In another context you might call this terminal inability to take a punch a ‘glass jaw.’ The term ‘keyboard warrior’ comes to mind. But I can think of another word for something that’s so ostentatious and in your face except for when it needs to be — a symbol of decadence and insecurity and deregulation that boasts bulletproof toughness, but which breaks into pieces at the first sign of stress. Elon’s not unstoppable, Wisconsin voters showed on Tuesday. When the rubber hits the road, he’s nothing but a Cybertruck.” (Seth Heald, Rixeyville, Va.)
In The Times, Lydia Polgreen explained how some foreigners — she had recently been reporting in Syria — were processing Trump’s cruelties and rashness: “It’s useful to see your own country through the eyes of those who have felt the rough end of its power and the chill of its indifference. The question, it seemed, was less what the United States is becoming, than whether Americans realize what it already is.” (Stephanie Grutzmacher, Tucson, Ariz.)
For the State House News Service, Chris Lisinski remarked that while some matters of Massachusetts government are “stuck in limbo,” keeping track of what’s going on in Trump’s Washington is “like trying to row vertically up Niagara Falls using a fork as a paddle.” (Martha Thurber, Buckland, Mass.)
It’s hard to pick just a few lines from David Roth’s examination, on the Defector website, of what Trump has done to us (and what we’ve done to ourselves), but these capture its haunted and haunting tone: “The world will cease to matter to him the moment he leaves it, and so he is more than happy to decree that everyone and everything be buried alongside him. It will be important to remember the shame of this moment, both how it felt and how it worked, when it is time to build whatever will rise from it.” (Adam Spivak, Salt Lake City)
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.
On a Personal Note
In my circles, people who wear their religious beliefs conspicuously and organize their lives around their faiths are the outliers, the curiosities, the ones asked to explain themselves.
But at a public event at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the other night, the dynamics were reversed. Of the three of us onstage, I alone didn’t profess a belief in God or locate my morality in any formal creed. And I was expected to answer for that.
Where, absent religion, did I find meaning in life? That question wasn’t put to me in exactly those words. But it was the gist of many of the prompts that came my way, and I struggled to respond to them, maybe because the audience’s skepticism about me was palpable, maybe because the hour was late. I have only so much coherence in me. I’d used up that day’s allotment.
What I should have said: I find meaning in a catchy melody. I find meaning in an artful turn of phrase. I find it in an entirely unnecessary kindness that I extend to someone or a wholly volitional gesture of courtesy that someone extends to me. I guess I’m saying that I find meaning in beauty — in our instinct and ability to fashion moments of grace that have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with transcendence.
I realize how close to God-speak that sounds. But aren’t at least a few of the differences between the overtly religious and the obliquely spiritual matters of metaphor and vocabulary?
I believe that this consciousness of ours and these lives we lead are grander than our most basic needs and most urgent desires. That conviction can be wrapped in or uncoupled from an elaborate mythology. In either case, it’s a gateway to joy and a portal to peace.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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