Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. There are a few turkeys we need to dig into, politically speaking, before we get to the actual one. Let me start with an appetizer: What do you think of Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, urging people to dress up for air travel?
Frank Bruni: I didn’t see that question coming! But good on you — it’s perfectly timed for the frenzied flying and crowded airports of the long Thanksgiving weekend. I must say, I don’t hate Duffy’s appeal for fewer track suits, less open-toe footwear. As long as we don’t veer into any elitist, priggish dress code, asking passengers to show minimal sartorial respect (and let’s keep hygiene in mind, too!) when jamming into a tight space with other humans doesn’t seem so very evil. You?
Bret: I was astounded by a statistic that went with Duffy’s plea: a 400 percent increase in “in-flight outbursts” since 2019, including 13,800 “unruly passenger incidents” since 2021. I realize there was a lot of pent-up rage that went with the pandemic, but that should have cooled off by now, don’t you think?
Frank: I think Americans are increasingly unfamiliar with — and uninterested in — the ideal, importance and rites of civility. The pandemic merely accelerated that.
Bret: “Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us. … According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”
Sorry, but I can’t pass up the temptation to quote Edmund Burke. Ireland’s greatest son would have understood the moment we’re in.
Frank: No apology necessary. I love it when you whisper sweet 18th-century philosophers in my ear. What you see in planes and airports is what you see in Congress and in the Trump administration. I’m not being glib. Too many of us are focused solely on getting what we want, and our preferred vent for frustration is demonizing and screeching at people who dare to get in our way. Is it such a leap from airborne outbursts to Secretary of Defense — excuse me, Secretary of War — Pete Hegseth trying to, I don’t know, court-martial Senator Mark Kelly, who’s a real American hero?
Bret: Hegseth — and Donald Trump, for that matter — are reminders that, even if “clothes make the man,” as the saying goes, short-fingered vulgarians will always be themselves. As for Senator Kelly, insisting that unlawful orders must not be obeyed makes him a patriot. If Major Hegseth wants to go after him, I’d say bring it on. It will go about as well for the War Department as the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James did for the Justice Department.
Frank: Kelly, Comey, James and too many others — they’re victims of the malignant belief among Trump and his co-conspirators that intimidation is the primary instrument of power and that the desire for vengeance is something to be quenched, like thirst. I can’t tell you, Bret, how much the sheer ugliness of it gnaws at me. I think part of what drives Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our esteemed secretary of illness — pardon me, health — to trash the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and elevate junk medicine over the real thing is that those behaviors flex his muscle and make him look fearsome in a way that boring, responsible stewardship wouldn’t. What’s power, after all, without the mischief and menace?
Bret: This has always been the Trumpian M.O.: the desperate, and unwittingly revealing, need to show that they’re the bigger man. Did Arnold Palmer ever feel such a compulsion? I doubt it.
The larger problem, though, is that a politics of politicized justice, of pursuing petty vendettas, winds up being self-defeating. The lesson of the efforts to prosecute Trump in the last administration is that trying to jail your political enemies winds up making them stronger. That’s exactly what this administration is going to wind up doing: strengthening its opponents. Which, perversely, may not be the worst thing. …
Frank: Not the worst thing at all. Let’s be clear about something, though: This notion, so popular with Trump and his abettors, that his politicized Department of Justice is simply a mirror of President Joe Biden’s and that the prosecutions he’s demanding echo the prosecutions of him is the epitome of a false equivalence and pure bunk. Yeah, the indictment and conviction of Trump for falsifying business records, in the case brought by Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, went overboard. But the other cases? They were solid. And they were righteous.
Bret: The only solid case I saw was the classified documents case.
Frank: Wait, wait — what about Georgia? There was audiotape. Trump is on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, telling him to go find and count 11,780 nonexistent votes. How is that not wrong and rank?
Bret: Wrong and rank don’t equal criminal. Fanni Willis, the hapless prosecutor, couldn’t make a case out of it, and now a judge has dismissed it for good. Generally speaking, the idea of trying to criminalize your political opponents is a bad one, except in some of the most egregious cases — most of which seem to take place in New Jersey.
Frank: Paging Robert Menendez!
Bret: You can trace Trump’s political resurrection, in early 2023 when the political smart set thought Ron DeSantis was the likely Republican nominee, almost to the moment the criminal indictments started to be brought against him. Do Democrats still think that treating Trump like an outlaw can hurt him or was ever going to — given that his whole political persona is based on its outlaw appeal?
Frank: I agree that the prosecutions ended up helping him, in part because Bragg’s was the first (and, in the end, only) one to come to trial. But in the same way that wrong and rank may not equal criminal, politically unwise does not equal unwarranted. Democrats weren’t going after Trump on a whim. It wasn’t persecution.
Bret: What’s going to wind up damaging Trump and other Republicans isn’t the illegality. It’s the incompetence. That’s where Democrats need to keep a laser focus. Is the cost of living going down? Are college graduates finding it easier to get a first job? Is the national debt under control? Do you feel prouder to be an American? Is the surrender plan that Trump has arranged for Ukraine a good idea that will bring lasting peace?
Frank: You have rhetorical questions, I have practical answers! No, no, no, no and no.
Bret: There’s a leadership issue with Democrats right now. I don’t envy Chuck Schumer, trying to hold together a Senate caucus that includes the “fight club” of colleagues like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, versus the “don’t do stupid stuff club” of people like Jeanne Shaheen and John Fetterman. What’s your advice to our friend from Brooklyn?
Frank: Poor Chuck. He’s a very, very smart man with an unrivaled work ethic who wants more than anyone — trust me — for Democrats to reclaim the Senate majority. My advice to him and to that “fight club” of senators unhappy with him is the same: The other side within your party has some points and some wisdom. This isn’t a binary. Meet in the middle; the middle is underrated. If you let this disagreement get too noisy and nasty, you all lose. And so, God help us, does America.
Bret: The middle is two things, I think. First, it’s tonal. The tone of nonstop, sky-is-falling, democracy-is-ending hysteria that typifies a lot of liberal discourse isn’t helping. Second, it’s about policy. Democrats need to reclaim the dead center of American politics. In some ways, that’s going to require a considerable shift to the right. Like on tariffs, for instance, or on education. If Democrats really want to fight, picking a fight with entrenched teachers’ unions that are doing more to help themselves than to educate public school kids — whose reading and math scores keep falling — would be a good place to start.
Frank: You know I’m with you on the dangers of Democrats tacking too far left and on the verdant, fertile political pastureland of the center. If the party has any doubts about that verdure and fertility, just look at Trump’s sudden desire to get somewhere closer to the center by now reportedly considering the extension of the Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies that his own legislation eliminated.
Bret: Here is where my inner conservative makes an appearance: Extending the subsidies when we are $38 trillion in debt is a bad idea! As policy. As politics, it’s surely good for Democrats.
Frank: I’m just noting Trump’s belated, baby-steps centrism.
Bret: Frank, I have to leave this conversation and get back to being a useful member of my family. Last question: Read anything good lately?
Frank: I loved a recent article in The New Yorker by Zach Helfand about the glow-up and metastasis of special-access airport lounges. Could anything be more America circa late 2025? (Well, apart from air rage and unruly passengers?) There’s the economic tiering of those lounges, the indulgence, the insistence that even air travel — which is supposed to be hellish, as a matter of character building — be bubble-wrapped and lubricated with bubbly drinks. Many affluent Americans no longer believe in civic institutions or community groups. But they believe in the free mediocre sushi and abundant charging stations of the airport lounge.
Bret: Oh, Frank. You just need to switch to a better airline, with better lounges and sushi. In the meantime, hope you have a great, joyous, politics-free Thanksgiving.
Frank: Same to you, my friend. Turkey, here I come!
Bret: That’s Eric Adams’s line, too, I’ll bet.
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