Trump Goes to War. And These Are His Advisers?

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When an American president makes an especially weighty decision, there’s some small comfort in knowing that seasoned, steady aides were in the mix, complementing the commander in chief’s instincts with their expertise.

President Trump dropped 15-ton bombs on uranium enrichment sites in Iran with Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary.

I, for one, am not comforted.

By some reports, Hegseth wasn’t consulted all that much — which, I suppose, is its own perverse solace. Trump apparently learned his lesson when Hegseth decided that a Signal group chat was the proper venue for an emoji-laden pep rally about imminent military strikes against the Houthis; clue Hegseth in on the Iran plan, and he might wind up divulging it in the form of charades on “Fox & Friends.”

And Gabbard? Her relationship with Trump is strained, to say the least; he told reporters on Air Force One to pay no heed to her statement several months ago that Iran wasn’t close to or all that focused on developing a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump blurted. Apart from how warm and fuzzy that brushoff must have made Gabbard feel, it spoke volumes about the limits of Trump’s confidence in — and use for — her.

So why did he give her such a crucial job? And how did Hegseth land an even bigger one?

Because Trump wasn’t judging prospective senior administration officials on their demonstrated fitness for their positions. Any old president can do that. Shock artists like him want to show how far outside the lines they’re willing to color. The kookier the crayon, the better.

And would-be despots make sure that the people just below them really and truly owe them. Gabbard; Hegseth; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; so many of Trump’s other flunkies — if not for him, they’d never enjoy the titles, the offices, the attention, the entourages they do. That primes their loyalty. It greases their sycophancy.

But while it was one thing to mull the lunacy of many of Trump’s personnel choices as they strutted through Senate confirmation hearings, it’s quite another to confront their inappropriateness when an impulsive, mercurial president takes a risk this enormous, commencing the kind of military intervention he long railed against, in a combustible region that he previously expressed such wariness about.

I found myself transfixed by the tableau late Saturday night when, in nationally televised remarks from the White House, Trump announced that the United States had attacked Iran. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Hegseth all stood around him with such strenuously blank expressions, such erect postures, it was as if they’d been turned into automatons and feared that any tiny twitch might be interpreted as doubt or disagreement.

If you’ve any doubts about the culture of flattery cultivated by Trump, I direct you to that recent text that he got from Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel, the ally pressing hard for America’s help in defanging Iran. It’s astonishing that Trump posted the text on social media — that he’s so eager to exhibit his acolytes’ praise, so insecure. But it’s no less astounding than the amplitude of Huckabee’s adoration. An evangelical Christian pastor, Huckabee wasn’t offering Trump diplomatic counsel. He was giving him an ecclesiastical massage.

Huckabee wrote that God had saved Trump from an assassination attempt “to be the most consequential President in a century — maybe ever.” “The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else,” he continued, in the best prose equivalent of genuflection that I’ve ever read. He added: “I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.” What a mammoth broom it must take to sweep that much history under the rug.

Concerns about who’s advising a president and how well they’re doing that certainly predate Trump. Most presidents seek affirmation, most have no trouble getting it, and all are pliable because all are human. Vice President Dick Cheney infamously egged on President George W. Bush. President Joe Biden’s protectors shielded him from the truth of his declining health and falling polls.

And the advisers with Trump’s ear right now include people of greater acumen than Gabbard and Hegseth. I’d put Vance and Marco Rubio in that group.

But from the moment they pledged their fealty to Trump, they grew less serious by the week. To track their time with him is to notice ever more performative demonstrations that they share his grudges and will act on his grievances. Vance berates Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in the Oval Office. Rubio channels Trump’s xenophobia and animus toward elite universities with a puffed-up panic over international students. Both men seem less devoted to complementing Trump than to complimenting him.

But what he needs at a juncture like this are confident confidants who can play devil’s advocate, not a coterie of toadies who whisper sweet nothings in his ear — or have nothing valuable to whisper at all.

For the Love of Sentences

In her newsletter, Wild Bare Thoughts, Stepfanie Tyler responded to nature’s bounty of beauty: “The world, I’ve discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere — the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases that earthy sweetness into the air.” But, she added, “here’s the thing about flirtation: It requires participation. The world can bat its eyelashes all it wants, but if we’re not looking, if we’re not present enough to catch the gesture, the moment dies unwitnessed.” (Thanks to John McMillian of Atlanta for nominating this.)

In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer admired the hungry, herbivorous goats being used, in lieu of traditional landscaping, to eliminate weeds from a Raleigh park: “Watching them for only five minutes, a spectator is reminded that one creature’s trash is another’s dinner, one beast’s toil is another’s reward. Our lives revolve and intersect in fur-covered symbiosis, turning meh into mehhhhhhh.” (Patricia Smith, Durham, N.C.)

In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman questioned the prose stylings in the novel “Next to Heaven,” by James Frey: “Single-sentence paragraphs, at their worst, suggest that he’s experiencing a kind of cognitive paper jam.” (Peter Brooks, Seattle)

On the ESPN website, Wright Thompson explained the pull of the ballpark where the New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge routinely dazzles: “I came to the Bronx in no small part to watch Judge swing — to have watched him swing — like visiting Amsterdam to sit with Van Gogh’s ‘Bedroom at Arles.’” (Patrick Quinn, Lawrence, Kan.)

In The Times, Sam Anderson marveled at the basketball giant (in several senses) Nikola Jokic: “He dominates games with a weird combination of force and delicacy. He’s like a car accident that can play the flute.” (Frank Thomas, Aledo, Texas)

Also in The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis reviewed an ultraviolent new movie: “A luxe orgy of mass murder, ‘Ballerina’ dances from one bloody melee to another, its back-of-a-matchbook plot (by Shay Hatton) driven solely by arterial motives.” (Dennis O’Shea, Baltimore, and Sharon Rubin, Stamford, Conn.)

Rhonda Garelick examined the cosmetic-surgery candor — no, boastfulness — of Kris Jenner and her daughter Kylie: “The elder Ms. Jenner can now wear her face and the younger Ms. Jenner her breasts as they would couture gowns. Their surgeons’ names anoint their body parts with the glow of purchased exclusivity, metamorphosing flesh into inanimate luxuries, like ivory or jewels, the Pygmalion story in reverse.” (Randy Lawrence, Junction City, Ohio)

Tressie McMillan Cottom rejected the liberal fantasy that the communication skills that worked for Barack Obama more than a decade ago might deliver salvation in this era of peak mendacity: “Demanding that he reconstitute objective truth is like me wearing lowrider jeans to coax my abs back into existence. The desire is understandable; it’s the expectation that is deranged.” (Lucette Veen, Portland, Ore., and Steve Sands, San Diego, among many others)

Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman remarked on the right-wing ire confronting Patel and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, as they fail to substantiate the accusations that they hurled in their bid for power: “They are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.” (Jeff Lebsack, Buffalo, and Marianne Painter, Tacoma, Wash., among others)

And Zolan Kanno-Youngs measured the micro-unit of time when Trump was drawn by Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, into a substantive discussion about Ukraine: “But then, like a sports fan who had accidentally found himself watching PBS, he changed the channel.” (Lisa Brandes, Nordland, Wash., and Cam Murray, Roseville, Calif.)

In The Financial Times, Edward Luce worried that certain scenes from the Los Angeles protests played into the president’s hands: “Every rock hurled lands like a penny in Trump’s wishing well.” (Todd Lowe, Simpsonville, Ky., and Al Gallo, Huntersville, N.C., among others)

In The Washington Post, Philip Bump expressed skepticism about the government’s claim that immigration officers must wear masks for self-protection: “We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” (Patrick Bell, Carmichael, Calif.)

Also in The Post, Dana Milbank took in Trump’s pleasure at some sycophantic Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa., and Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)

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, Writing and Listening To

• Many journalists can vividly describe what’s around them, but only the most talented can identify — in pretty much any public figure, any public event — worlds of meaning that the rest of us miss. That’s what Robin Givhan has been doing for decades, including in the fashion criticism that won her a Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and it’s what she does in her new book, “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh,” out this week. Abloh, a Black designer with no formal fashion training, made history when he was appointed the head of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton in 2018, and Robin illuminates how unlikely and important that was. I must call her by her first name; we go all the way back to the early 1990s in Detroit, where we lived in the same apartment building, had a standing weekly date to watch “L.A. Law” together and worked at almost adjacent desks at The Detroit Free Press. It’s such a privilege to be Robin’s friend — and an even greater one to read her.

• What will the landscape of higher education look like after Trump’s rampage across it? In this recent Times Opinion round table, my Times colleague Ross Douthat; Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard University president; and I share our thoughts.

• Even in this food-obsessed era, I’ve met few people who lavished the degree of microscopic attention on their diets that the billionaire David Murdock did. I mention that because he died two weeks ago, at the age of 102. And because that news prompted me to revisit this 2011 magazine profile that I wrote about his determination to live to 125.

• Maybe because my three siblings and I just took our big annual vacation together, I found myself revisiting a favorite Concrete Blonde song and surrendering to its sappiness anew. I’m referring to “Little Sister,” from the band’s 1986 self-titled debut album, a paradigm of that era’s alternative rock. “Our mama’s nest is empty, all the babies gone and grown,” the song begins. “And you’re talking, but I hear me. You should hear you.” From there it’s an epigrammatic, humble, hummable ode to the complicated push and pull of kin. Too much of Concrete Blonde’s output was a mix of drearily safe bids for radio play and abrasive acts of self-indulgence, but there were scattered standouts: half the tracks on that impressive debut album; “God Is a Bullet,” a sonic rant against gun violence, gang violence and police brutality; “Tomorrow, Wendy,” a bewitchingly lugubrious and melodramatic reflection on mortality. The lead singer Johnette Napolitano’s dusky, jagged voice had definite limits but also harbored — and communicated — real pain.

On a Personal Note

That trip with my siblings that I just mentioned: It took us outside the United States, to Europe, where we spent two weeks. That was when the National Guard and then the Marines descended on Los Angeles. When Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground. When an assassin stalked Minnesota lawmakers. When Trump treated the American military the way some gym rats treat their biceps, flexing his muscle as a salve for his insecurity and a signal to his fans and foes alike.

Friends emailed and texted: Wasn’t I glad to be diverted from all this?

For sure.

Didn’t I wish I could stay away?

Absolutely not.

I understand all the talk of emigrating and rich people’s fascination with golden visas and with second (or, rather, third or fourth) homes abroad as upsized, seafront panic rooms of a sort. I too am horrified by what’s happening here, terrified of where Trump and his enablers may take us and disillusioned, bitterly, by how many people rationalize that or retreat to fiction, which eclipses fact as seldom before.

But this is my country every bit as much as it is Trump’s. It’s my home, and my ease in its presence, my understanding of its foibles, my awareness of its potential and my investment in its welfare are as foundational as my attachment to my family is. I wouldn’t be able to purge my two brothers and my sister from my heart and my thoughts if I wanted to — which I don’t. The same goes for my country.

It cradled me. Nurtured me. Gave me not only my dreams but also the means to make a few of them come true. I borrowed bits of its crazy confidence. I absorbed many of its lofty ideals. All the while my roots in its soil and in its sensibility grew deeper, thicker, stronger.

I’m planted here, for better and for worse, and I maintain at least a smidgen of faith that better will prevail. That’s an American outlook for you. And I’m an American to the bone.

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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