Bret Stephens: Happy new year, Frank, Hebraically speaking. Here’s me offering a quiet prayer to a year that is at least modestly less bad than the last one. Any chance of that?
Frank Bruni: “Modestly less bad”? Low bar there, Bret. My year is going to be great, because I just foraged in the woods for the toadstools, sassafras and myrtle with which I’m replacing the Tylenol and other suspicious characters in my medicine cabinet.
Bret: Are you planning on getting pregnant?
Frank: Just girding for the next assault on responsible science and the one after that.
Bret: You know: I’ve never done acid or any other psychedelic — probably not something I should confess in public, but there you go. But day-to-day living through this administration gives me a pretty good idea of what a really strange trip must feel like.
Frank: Let’s just say that I’ve been more pharmacologically adventurous than you, and I can assure you that there’s not a drug in this world that produces anything like the wonder, confusion and nausea of beholding — and being subject to — this president.
Bret: It was a little more than five years ago that the president suggested that drinking bleach or putting a UV light inside your body could treat Covid-19. Back then, the condemnation was so swift that Trump retreated and pretended he had been joking. The difference in this second administration is that he’s not retreating — on pretty much anything. Now that he’s appointed himself the OB-GYN in chief, I really have to wonder what’s next. Curator of the Smithsonian? Architect of the White House?
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