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?
Oh, wait …
Frank: Bret, you’re getting at the essence of where we are — of where Trump has taken us. He has, by design, worn Americans down. Overwhelmed us. How can we give proper attention to “I hate my opponent” on Sunday in Arizona when on Tuesday in Manhattan, he’s telling foreign leaders that their countries are all “going to hell” and only he can make peace and by the way, the escalator at the United Nations is on the fritz. Dizzying doesn’t begin to describe this. Let me repeat myself: no drug like it.
Bret: OK, so here’s something else I probably shouldn’t confess: I kinda liked the U.N. speech.
Frank: Oh, boy, I can’t wait to hear this ….
Bret: When I say “liked,” I mean it in the way that I love the scene from “Animal House” in which Flounder, the chubby frat boy, throws up on the stuck-up, malevolent Dean Wormer. Trump is vulgar, a bully, frequently out of his depth. But on Tuesday he took aim at a despicable organization. An organization whose peacekeepers are infamous for raping children and spreading cholera; that obsessively condemns Israel as if it were responsible for all the world’s human-rights abuses; that gives Russia, Iran, China and other thuggish countries a form of respectability they don’t deserve. I wouldn’t be the least bit sorry to see the U.N. packed off to Pakistan, Paraguay or Papua New Guinea.
Frank: But Trump’s speech wasn’t merely or principally a scolding of the U.N. It was a middle finger raised to the entire world, and the U.N.’s sins don’t make that virtuous — or smart. China now rivals and in some ways bests us as a superpower. We can’t afford to insult and extort and estrange our longtime friends; we need those alliances more than ever, as Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi explained recently in an important essay for Times Opinion. Trump is being reckless — and epically narcissistic. Let me summarize that nearly hourlong ramble at the U.N. for you: me, me, me, me, me. The United States has gone from Manifest Destiny to Manifest Vanity.
Bret: OK, that’s a line of genius: You should save it for a future column. And I agree that Trump is doing all kinds of damage to America’s global standing, not least by threatening some of our staunchest allies — Denmark, Canada, Panama and so on. But I think it’s a mistake that many of us who loathe Trump often make: because he routinely attacks status-quo institutions, whether it’s the United Nations or the mainstream media or elite academia or various agencies of government, we become knee-jerk defenders of that status quo. We need to find a way to acknowledge that many of those institutions are broken even as we try to repair, not destroy, them.
Frank: We must do precisely that, and the Democrats’ failures along those lines provided much of Trump’s rocket fuel. But as he demonstrated at both the Charlie Kirk memorial and the U.N., Trump isn’t interested in real repair, in durable remedies; he’s too busy with vengeance and theatrics. You mentioned Russia: Not so long ago, Trump rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska, blew air kisses at him and then, immediately afterward, told his Fox News pedicurist Sean Hannity that he’d rate the meeting “a 10” — as if Vlad were Bo Derek back in the day. Well, Bo proceeded to pummel Ukraine mercilessly and repeatedly invade European Union airspace.
Bret: Comparing Hannity to a pedicurist is rude and unfair. To pedicurists.
You’ve put your finger on something really important: This is a globally consequential time we’re living through, similar in my mind to the 1930s. Russia’s appetite for destruction shows no sign of abating. Europe is at its weakest point in nearly a century. China is putting on displays of military might reminiscent of the Soviet Union. I wouldn’t want to own beachfront in Taiwan. And America, the last best hope of the earth, is being led by a jackass.
The opportunity for Democrats right now is to get serious. Make the stakes clear to the American people. Become, once again, the party of F.D.R. and Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, defending the free world while exemplifying what it means to stand for the values of a free society. I can think of at least some Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel and Seth Moulton and Ritchie Torres, who get this. But too many Democrats just seem small for the moment.
Frank: With precisely what megaphone are Democrats supposed to do that? And are you confident they’d find an attentive, receptive audience?
Bret: If I were Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore — two Democratic governors I can envision as future presidents — I’d start brushing up on foreign policy and delivering some very sober speeches about the threats we face, much as Winston Churchill did during his so-called wilderness years of the 1930s. Americans may not be looking now, but they will be yearning for a grown-up come 2028.
Frank: Um, I love your idealism, but Democrats first have to survive 2026. And manage the tensions between the young progressives who are doing cartwheels about Zohran Mamdani and the older institutionalists who can barely bring themselves to say his name. Also, I haven’t seen much evidence in recent American elections that foreign policy and grand visions of global leadership win the day. The problem for Democrats right now is the sheer number and range of fronts on which they have to counter and call out Trump. It is, again, overwhelming.
And Democratic smallness pales next to Republican smallness. Republicans, not Democrats, have the votes in Congress to contain the damage that Trump is doing — to make sure that he recognizes the bigness of this moment, which you so eloquently described — but many of them discarded values they’d long preached and positions they’d long held to curtsy to their capricious ruler. Remember that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once an impassioned proponent of aid to Ukraine, did a 180-degree turn and cheered Trump on social media after Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Let’s apportion the shame fairly.
Bret: It says everything about the state of the Republican Party today that Ted Cruz is now its profile in courage for speaking out against the Federal Communications Commission’s Brendan Carr for trying to cancel Jimmy Kimmel. But bemoaning Republican cowardice and cravenness isn’t going to save anybody: Like a lot of political commentary these days, it’s just so much screaming into the wind. What the country desperately needs is a competent opposition party.
Frank: And fewer guns. (Which, by the way, that opposition party rightly presses for.) I’m horrified by the fatal shooting on Wednesday at an ICE facility in Dallas — although we probably won’t have reliable details about it for a while, it looks like yet more political violence. Bret, I don’t think the knot in my stomach could get any tighter.
Bret: Last year I wrote a column titled “Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term.” One of my fears is that, far from demolishing the extreme left, Trump would re-energize and radicalize it, particularly around the topic of deportations. From the little we know about this shooting so far, that seems to be the case here. I just hope it’s not a harbinger of yet more political violence to come.
Ugh. But, hey, we started this conversation trying to find something optimistic to say. So far we’ve failed completely. Anything even modestly heartwarming come across your screen recently?
Frank: I was buoyed by Dwight Garner’s celebration of Ian McEwan’s new novel “What We Can Know.” The review reaffirmed not only the endurance of pleasures — Dwight’s beautifully turned insights, McEwan’s gorgeously wrought fiction — but also the persistence of wisdom. From the vantage point of the 22nd century, one of McEwan’s characters says that he’d “like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: If you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.” Point taken (he typed on a keyboard, staring at a screen).
What about you, Bret?
Bret: Frank, one of the things we have in common is a love of art. Another thing, much deeper, is our love of dogs. Which makes it essential that you read Nina Siegal’s fabulous report from Amsterdam, on the figure of the dog that Rembrandt inconspicuously added to his masterpiece, “The Night Watch.” Anne Lenders, a sharp-eyed curator at the Rijksmuseum, figured out that the great Dutch master had probably copied the dog from a drawing by Adriaen van de Venne, a slightly older artist, a similarity that had been obscured for decades after “The Night Watch” was vandalized in 1975. The kicker of Siegal’s story, quoting the museum’s director, Taco Dibbits (what a name!), is worth replicating:
“‘Even 400 years after the creation of one of the most known paintings, you can still discover things,’ Dibbits said. ‘With art, you will always continue to pose questions, and in this case, it’s: Which dog is it?’”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
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
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
The post Trump Will Not Retreat appeared first on New York Times.
