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In a recent development obscured by President Trump’s many other provocations, several news organizations reported that his administration was considering a $5 million payout to relatives of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran fatally shot by the police during the Jan. 6, 2021, rioting at the Capitol.
Babbitt belonged to the violent mob that smashed its way into the building and bloodied the uniformed men and women trying to protect terrified members of Congress. She was crawling through a shattered glass door between her and the House floor when the bullet struck her. Her death is a terrible thing, but prosecutors cleared the officer who fired at her of any wrongdoing, saying the officer had reason to believe that he was acting in defense of himself and those lawmakers.
So why is the Justice Department not only settling the lawsuit that Babbitt’s relatives filed but also mulling an apology in the millions? Because Trump’s alternate reality demands it. Because that is how you turn truth entirely on its head.
You don’t simply challenge what really happened at the Capitol, which is that lawless hooligans in thrall to Trump’s delusions attempted a kind of coup. You chip-chip-chip away at it in so many ways over so much time and with such unflagging frequency that many people who thought they understood what they were seeing aren’t wholly sure anymore — or give up trying to make sense of it.
Trump recast a day of shame as a “day of love.” The rioters became “patriots” and Babbitt a martyr. As soon as Trump returned to the Oval Office, he pardoned nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people criminally charged in connection with the rioting. He even floated the idea of a compensation fund for them. Everybody gets a prize!
To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.
Politicians routinely don masks, twist facts and peddle fables — President Joe Biden’s pretense of undiminished vigor and acuity is a recent and egregious example of that. But Trump’s machinations and manipulations go beyond discrete feints and specific ruses. They’re in an unscrupulous league of their own.
Consider his $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News over a segment of “60 Minutes” just before the 2024 election that, in Trump’s view, put a halo on Kamala Harris. That sum may be the stuff of comedy, but Trump’s pattern of aggressive and often ludicrous litigation against media organizations is more melodrama. It’s meant to make the cost of displeasing him so steep — all those court dates, all those attorneys’ fees — that journalists no longer risk his displeasure. It’s a prophylactic against unflattering coverage.
So are other acts of intimidation. His administration is trying to exile The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One. It reallocated media real estate at the Pentagon from news organizations it didn’t like to ones it considered friendlier. It moved to sideline the White House Correspondents’ Association, announcing that it would take charge of determining which news organizations were represented at key White House events. That’s how Brian Glenn, who is a correspondent for the right-wing cable channel Real America’s Voice and also Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, ended up at Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Glenn used that coveted access to berate Zelensky for not wearing a suit.
Meantime, Trump appointed a new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, who wears a lapel pin that’s a gold medallion in the shape of Trump’s head and has gone after Trump’s enemies in a fashion that grossly politicizes a regulatory body that’s supposed to be nonpartisan. He has ordered investigations into PBS, into NPR, into Disney, into Comcast. The reasons vary; the bullying doesn’t. And it extends to the Trump administration’s assault on scientific organizations, academic institutions and law firms — Trump clearly wants to depopulate, discredit and disarm the ranks of experts and advocates potentially critical of him.
Trump’s determination to script an epically celebratory teleplay of his presidency also includes the careful casting of supporting players. He seemingly chose many of his cabinet members for their poise, primping and eagerness to appear on camera and praise him effusively. His administration has beckoned Trump-besotted newbies into the scrum of journalists in the White House briefing room. It has also used social media and a new website to pump out gobs of pro-Trump content. “The White House is deploying its platforms and personnel in ways that often feel more like how a modern media company would operate than a national government,” wrote Neal Rothschild in a recent article in Axios. The article’s headline: “Trump’s White House is the hottest right-wing media outlet.”
And Trump’s White House is all about exultant labels and elaborate staging. The sweeping spending package that he’s hawking is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Its proposed $1,000 bequests to new parents are “Trump accounts.” His tariffs heralded Liberation Day.
If history is written by the victors, the present is fabricated by those who throw themselves most ruthlessly and shamelessly into the storytelling. Trump and his principal abettors are just about peerless in that regard. Rather than own up to the administration’s error in consigning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump falsely and stubbornly insists that Abrego Garcia has the name of the gang MS-13 tattooed on his hand. He showcases accusations of domestic violence in Abrego Garcia’s past. He and his aides rework the details so that Trump is without blame or blemish.
Just as they’ve done with Jan. 6. That day is a searing indictment of Trump — so he inverts it. Babbitt is reborn as an innocent. The hellions around her are a heavenly choir. That song they’re now singing? It’s an elegy for honesty.
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For the Love of Sentences
In The Wall Street Journal, Dan Neil recounted a spin in the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Roadster convertible that was less test drive than love affair. The car’s color, called satin iridescent sapphire, “infuses the carbon-fiber body panels with a hitherto undreamt, scarcely believable shade of teal, its polarized highlights shifting from indigo to forest-green in the brilliant sun like the chromatophores of the world’s sexiest octopus,” he wrote. He also acknowledged the mismatch of a chariot with few miles on it and a charioteer with many: “For a man of my age and grooming to rumble through downtown Palm Springs alone in a drop-top Aston Martin the color of Superman’s eyes … Well, it suggests I’m looking for a party. If anything, I’m just looking for a bathroom.” (Thanks to Trevor Hale of Washington and Saul Himelfarb of Baltimore for nominating this.)
Also in The Journal, Kyle Smith found a disequilibrium in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” starring (and sanctifying) Tom Cruise: “Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.” (Mary Stagaman, Cincinnati)
In The Times, Bruce Handy spotted the same tilt: “We get to see Mr. Cruise dangle off not one but two biplanes and sprint back and forth across the streets of London with arms pumping manfully when he could have taken an Uber. For several scenes in which the necessities of plot and beefcake delivery force him to strip down to his boxer briefs, we also get to marvel at his perfectly toned senior body, which would be the envy at any recreational facility, not just the pickleball courts at the Villages.” (Abigail Pogrebin, Manhattan, and Mark Van Loon, Hamilton, Mont., among others)
Also in The Times, Emily Keegin appraised the recent redo of the Oval Office: “Gilded rococo wall appliqués, nearly identical to the ones at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, are stuck to the fireplace and office walls with the same level of aesthetic consideration a child gives her doll’s face before covering it in nail polish.” (Ned Warner, Belgrade, Maine, and Mary Paterno, Kutztown, Penn., among many others)
And Maureen Dowd identified the main dish at Trump’s dinner to reward the top investors in his memecoin as “pan-seared influence peddling with a citrus reduction.” (Daniel Woolf, Yarker, Ontario, and Paul Archipley, Mukilteo, Wash., among many others)
In a column published in both Air Mail and The Guardian, Marina Hyde detailed the extravagance of Lauren Sánchez’s bachelorette party in Paris: “There was also an ostentatiously open-top boat ride down the Seine, where I think the ladies went to view the floating corpse of a trend once known as ‘quiet luxury.’” (Peter Frank, Manhattan)
In his newsletter, Discoursted, Louis Pisano wondered about an honor given to Sánchez in Cannes, France, where she arrived on the mega-yacht belonging to her beau, Jeff Bezos: “You can’t ride in on a carbon-belching sea fortress and accept an award for climate advocacy. That’s like setting a forest fire and accepting a plaque for your marshmallow-roasting technique.” (Joe Doggett, West Dover, Vt.)
In The Marin Independent Journal, Jackie Burrell revisited the 2023 novel “What Never Happened,” by Rachel Howzell Hall, whose protagonist returns to Catalina Island a few decades after her family was murdered there: “What awaits isn’t exactly sunshine and sand — more like buried secrets, a violent home invasion and a serial killer — and there’s no way to escape, except by reading faster.” (Michael Stryker, Kentfield, Calif.)
In The New Yorker, Claire Malone measured the warring tugs on Bezos, who owns both Amazon and The Washington Post: “At a time when mainstream media outlets are widely distrusted, the number of people who want to pay for quality news in America is distinctly smaller than the number of those who want to order two-ply toilet paper that will arrive the next day.” (Madelyn Weiss, Berkeley, Calif.)
And in Harper’s, John Jeremiah Sullivan noted that Ron Chernow, the author of a major new book about Mark Twain, belongs to a small club of “our great Biographers of the Great”: “On some future day he, Walter Isaacson and Jon Meacham will write biographies of one another, and the faces on Mount Rushmore will simultaneously explode.” (John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)
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
“Somebody says apps,” wrote Rick Methot, of Hamilton, N.J., “and I picture mozzarella sticks.”
That was one of many responses I received to my lament last week about the exasperating effect of all the digital-age innovations and wireless efficiencies that promise to smooth our days. I seemed to hit a nerve, especially among readers around my age (60) and older. Methot is 80.
In that newsletter, I recounted my recent iPhone upgrade, all the headaches that came with it and all the annoyances that attend other gizmos, gadgets and ostensible shortcuts. But your emails reminded me that I left out a lot.
Such as the enigma of the contemporary car dashboard, with which our wondrous smartphones are supposed to sync. (The “supposed” in that sentence carries enormous weight.) I’ve yet to decode much of my dashboard hieroglyphics; I’m pretty sure it can iron my dress shirts and make paella with the right inputs. I just need to spend more time with the 1,924-page instruction manual.
I also didn’t mention those extensive online questionnaires that precede an appointment with a physician, a veterinarian, a mechanic. They demand information that you’ve provided a dozen previous times, and then you show up and are asked to verify the answers in a process that takes as long as it would have if you’d skipped the prior survey altogether.
I omitted “mobile” bank deposits. It’s easier to photograph the vainest diva in Hollywood than to get the right shot of your check, because your camera is too close or too far or too angled or too something else, and the check isn’t centered or the surface on which you’ve set it is too light or too dark.
But a few of you correctly noted that none of that grief comes close to erasing the advantages of our modern hacks. Conrad Macina, 77, of Landing, N.J., wrote: “When you replaced your iPhone you replaced your telephone, camera, address book, calculator, photo albums, dictionary, thesaurus, atlas, radio, television, record player, newspaper, language teacher, light switches and much more — simultaneously. Yes, this sort of change can be a pain, but it’s a lot easier than it was when you had to replace each item individually.”
That’s indisputably true. My point wasn’t and isn’t that we’re worse off. It’s that these conveniences are never as convenient as they’re cracked up to be.
As for those of you who observed that I could easily have forgone the glitchy app-controlled lightbulbs that I described, I have a one-word retort: dimmers. If a lamp doesn’t have one but such a bulb remedies that, I’m in, no matter how much troubleshooting I incur. There’s too little kindness in this world not to seize the cosmetic mercy of softer lighting.
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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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