Beginning June 23, this newsletter will be published on Monday mornings. It will take a short break until then.
The most senior officials in the Trump administration are such a cuckoo crew that it’s easy to miss the kookiness just a tick below.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dan Bongino.
And I’ll catch you up, in case — I envy you! — you’ve been rationing your exposure to MAGA madness.
He’s a former police officer, Secret Service agent and host of a popular right-wing podcast who was bafflingly given the job of second in command at the F.B.I., presumably so that the similarly underqualified first in command, Kash Patel, wouldn’t feel overshadowed. Bongino and Patel are a matched set, two peas in a Trump-adoring pod, and it’s impossible to say which is odder.
Or at least it was until last week, when Bongino took the crown with a bizarrely self-pitying and digressive interview — where else? — on Fox News.
He was there, seemingly, as part of a recent media effort by him and Patel to calm agitators on the right who wonder why the dynamic duo haven’t yet unveiled and detailed all the supposed corruption in the F.B.I. that they both railed against back when they were in charge of nothing more than promoting conspiracy theories and whipping up fury.
And Bongino, after fewer than three months as the bureau’s deputy director, was feeling beaten down and trying to buck himself up.
He wanted Fox News viewers to know about his sacrifice: “I gave up everything for this.” He wanted them to appreciate how hard he and Patel work: “If you think we’re there for tea and crumpets — I mean, Kash is there all day. We share — our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet, I hear it.”
The faucet? What does plumbing have to do with F.B.I.-ing? And why did viewers need to know about Patel’s and Bongino’s workout schedules, which Bongino mentioned next? He volunteered that Patel tended to arrive at the office earlier than he did, because Patel “uses the gym” there, while Bongino exercises in his apartment. Glad we finally have clarity on that.
And on this: “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced, but I mean separated,” Bongino said, before further refining his word choice and explaining that by “separated” he meant “apart,” on account of all that grueling work he must do. “It’s hard,” he said. “We love each other.” So now that’s settled, too.
Next month will be the first anniversary of Tim Walz’s branding of Donald Trump, JD Vance and, by implication, some of their political associates as “weird,” and it’s obvious now that Walz spoke too soon, before Trump won in November and his administration turned weirdness into a credential and an operating principle, before weirdness started afflicting Trump allies who seemed a little less weird in the past, before episodes of Trump-adjacent weirdness proliferated.
Look at Senator Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican. “We all are going to die,” Ernst said last week during a town-hall meeting where one of the attendees challenged her on the consequences of proposed new Medicaid cuts. That remark wasn’t just glib and callous; it was flat-out weird. As was her subsequent stab at damage control, which included the counsel that if you want to live forever, you should worship Jesus Christ. So the new MAGA health care plan is almost literally a Hail Mary.
Walz spoke in advance of Elon Musk’s emergence and anointment as a MAGA hatchet (by which I mean chain saw) man and thus the addition of his weirdness to the existing smorgasbord. For a while now, Musk has been running some kind of weirdness decathlon, summiting some sort of weirdness Everest (and, given his pharmacological affinities, probably inhaling all the xenon gas he can en route). Add his Nazi-evocative salute and Oval Office attire and demeanor to the eccentricities that were in place before his and Trump’s ill-fated bromance and he’s making a persuasive case that extreme weirdness is the emotional analogue of gargantuan yachts: a privilege of the ultrarich.
It’s weird that Joe Kasper, the chief of staff to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, reportedly digresses during meetings at the Pentagon to discuss such crucial national security issues as a visit he made to a Washington strip club. It’s weird that Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, dressed as if she were heading out for a vigorous walk in the woods — well, apart from the $50,000 gold Rolex on her wrist — for a photo op in front of caged inmates at an infamous gulag in El Salvador.
I’d say it’s weird that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, frolicked with his grandchildren in a Washington creek thought to be contaminated with fecal matter, but that’s unremarkable in the context of his prior antics. For him to clear his own weirdness bar, he’d have to bottle that creek water and carry it home as a thrifty alternative to Evian.
I joke to cope. But this pageant of peculiarity isn’t a laughing matter. It reflects Trump’s confusion of nonconformity with boldness. It speaks to his love of performance, even if it’s the fruit of a loopy performer. It demonstrates his desire to rattle, no matter how infantile the rattling. Bongino is welcome to melt down. So long as he’s owning the libs while he’s melting.
A Word About Democrats’ Woes
If I’m subjected to one more lamentation, one more rant, about how lost and pitiable and shameful the Democratic Party is, my head is going to explode. Not because the Democratic Party is in good shape — it isn’t. Not because it can make do with only minor adjustments — it can’t. It’s guilty of the arrogance and incompetence of which it’s accused. And the country’s future as a reasonably healthy and prosperous democracy depends on Democrats’ recognition and remedy of that.
But some of the extravagant lashing of the party carries the implicit suggestion that Republicans, by contrast, have their act together. Excuse me? If success at the polls is the only metric for that, then sure, yes, they’re in an enviable spot. But it’s a wretched (and, I have to believe, vulnerable) one. Republican lawmakers who rightly gaped in horror at the events of Jan. 6, 2021, later developed collective amnesia, putting power several light-years above principle. They then indulged or outright applauded Trump’s laughable cabinet picks and his adoration of Musk and his cockamamie tariffs and his abandonment of due process and his swag from Qatar and his sadistic humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and so many other cruelties and outrages that this sentence could go on forever. I struggle to admire Republicans’ political chops. I’m too distracted by their moral rot.
What I’m Doing, Fleeing From and Listening To
-
Given that I’m a big, longtime Fleetwood Mac fan, it’s fun to be able to quote a popular song of theirs from 1975: Monday morning, you sure look fine. That’s going to be the new weekly time, beginning June 23, when this newsletter lands in your inbox.
-
I recently visited Asheville, N.C., for the first time in more than three decades. What a special place. I don’t mean the mountains. I mean the creative energy that you can sense almost everywhere you turn, a spirit that guides the city’s continued recovery from Hurricane Helene. There remains an abundance of craftspeople designing eye-catching structures, fashioning gorgeous ceramics and — the surest way to my heart — making excellent drinks and terrific food. On the second of my two nights there, my friends and I walked from their house on the edge of the River Arts District to Crucible for cocktails and then to All Souls Pizza for carbs. I was fondly reflecting on both of those experiences the next morning when, on a short walk just before leaving, Regan (my dog) and I ran into an animal somewhat larger than the groundhogs we’d spotted the previous day. A bear was making a feast of some vegetation in someone’s backyard, less than 50 feet from us. Worried that the creature might deem Regan even tastier, I beat a quick and quiet path back to my friends’ front door.
-
On the three-hour drive home to Chapel Hill, I got the urge to listen to decades-old music by Lone Justice and its leader singer, Maria McKee, who had a subsequent solo career. I was reminded of, and I reveled in, her extraordinary voice. On the records that she made between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, she could sound gravelly or velvety, sassy or celestial. She could tilt toward gentle country music or muscular rock and often landed in some niche of her own in between. For a sampler that provides a sense of her dexterity and power, check out “Ways to Be Wicked” — which, along with “Show Me Heaven,” probably got the most radio play of her songs — and give a listen as well to the melancholic “Dixie Storms,” the defiant “Can’t Pull the Wool Down (Over the Little Lamb’s Eyes),” the bitter “Life Is Sweet,” the pleading “Don’t Toss Us Away” and the exultant “I Found Love.”
For the Love of Sentences
In Wired, Brian Barrett observed that while Elon Musk has quit Washington, his lieutenants and his destructive impulses haven’t, so retiring DOGE “would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water.” (Thanks to Carolyn Jones of Charlotte, N.C., and Alan Stamm of Birmingham, Mich., among others, for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Matt Bai bid adieu to a special Trump-administration someone. “As Elon Musk departs Washington, his mood resembles his Cybertruck: ugly and adolescent,” Bai wrote. Bai also prophesied Musk’s complaint that “he came to Washington as a private-sector patriot, offering to take government to new heights, and found himself smacked down to earth by powerful forces of gravity and inertia. It’s a convenient fiction. Musk’s flameout had nothing to do with gravity, and everything to do with the lack of it.” (Margi Vanderhye, McLean, Va., and Bob Rappaport, Arlington, Va., among others)
In The Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg recognized a familiar dynamic in Trump’s assaults on Harvard: “The president is venting his fury — a sentence I could embroider on a pillow and use to begin every column from now until 2029, since off-gassing his bottomless magisterial displeasure is the spoon stirring our national existence, now and for the foreseeable future.” (John Metz, Evanston, Ill.)
In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce exposed federal lawmakers’ stealth: “The basic unfathomability of the federal budget process is such a boon to legislators who want to do mischief without leaving any fingerprints on the gun or DNA on the knife. There are so many statutes, regulations, informal rules and customs, and parliamentary bear traps that an appropriation to clean Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore might well also commit the federal government to building 12 nuclear aircraft carriers in a boat basin outside Yankton, South Dakota.” (Parashar Patel, Concord, Mass.)
In The Times, Sam Roberts mined the origins of an urban treasure. “It’s been said that Nelson Rockefeller, who as a grown-up managed the opening of Rockefeller Center, the real estate colossus in Midtown Manhattan, liked to play with blocks as a boy: the ones between 49th and 55th Streets,” he wrote. (Miriam Bulmer, Mercer Island, Wash.)
Also in The Times, Dr. Sunita Puri reported that the wishes of patients who were confronting their own mortality included the desire “to breed one last litter of puppies and inhale, one final time, the milky sweet of their young fur.” (Ian MacIntyre, Bermuda)
Joseph Finder reviewed “The Illegals,” by Shaun Walker, about Russian spies in America “who lived with fabricated identities as beautifully lacquered as a set of matryoshka dolls. These weren’t diplomatic spies with immunity; they were ghosts walking among us with American accents and, presumably, Sam’s Club memberships.” (Jack Grimshaw, Lake Forest, Calif.)
Ainslie Hogarth identified the social commentary in the new Stephen King novel “Never Flinch,” which “calls attention to the very real dangers of turning your convictions into accessories, exsanguinated by the impulse to broadcast them; of standing for nothing but your own image, satisfied by only appearing to have done the right thing. Thoughts and prayers alone won’t fix our problems; they might even obscure how little meaningful action is being taken to fix them.” (Mark Cameron, Suquamish, Wash.)
And Peter Mehlman responded to what he saw as the mirthless tyranny of Kennedy’s assault on junk food by heading to a grocery store and stocking up on it. “Within minutes, my cart held an old-school reunion while it still could: Wonder Bread, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Kellogg’s Corn Pops, Entenmann’s doughnuts (with the dark brown waxy coating they don’t even pretend to call chocolate on the box), Hungry Man (né Swanson’s) fried chicken — OMG: frozen White Castle burgers! — Nestlé’s Quik, now Nesquik (“Same tooth decay, one fewer syllable!”), whole milk, the once un-P.C. Uncle Ben’s rice and grossly un-P.C. Aunt Jemima’s syrup (both revamped), Oscar Mayer bologna and, just to keep current, maximum strength Pepcid,” he wrote. (Matt Masiero, Richmond, 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.
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
The post Remember Tim Walz’s ‘Weird’ Comment? He Spoke Too Soon. appeared first on New York Times.
