Bret Stephens: Frank, when we conversed last week we had only just seen the news from Minneapolis of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent. Now the country has had a week to digest this enormity. Your thoughts?
Frank Bruni: I don’t know that I have thoughts so much as overwhelming feelings of sadness and disgust. And I’m really, really scared — by the needlessness and senselessness of her killing; by the responses of President Trump and Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Cruelty Kristi Noem; by how eager they are to see Americans at one another’s throats. Isn’t that rancor the soil in which this authoritarian project grows?
Bret: I’m as law-and-order as it gets. But what’s happening in Minneapolis seems more like a foreign invasion than law enforcement, with more ICE agents in the city than police. And what I saw in that video was neither law nor order. It was the brute abuse of power. The penalty for civil disobedience used to be a citation, maybe even a night in jail. Now it’s a bullet.
Frank: And the complete, relentless savaging of your reputation. Trump and his cabal are pretending that Good deserved this. They’re not just spinning what happened. They’re going to extraordinary lengths to vilify her, to demonize her, ludicrously casting her as some clandestinely funded terrorist. This is what they do, whether they’re rewriting the history of Jan. 6, 2021, or investigating political opponents or justifying the use of military force: They weave gaudy, nasty fictions in the service of utter domination. Where and how, Bret, does that end?
Bret: Left unchecked? It ends in a police state.
Frank: It really isn’t any more ambiguous than that, is it?
Bret: Here’s where we probably differ: I think our system of checks and balances will continue to function, and — try as they might — wannabe authoritarians like Vance and Noem will ultimately remain wannabes. Our democracy isn’t like the Weimar Republic, fragile and shallow, ripe for overthrowing. Historically we’ve survived a lot worse. We’ll survive this, too.
Frank: “We’ve survived a lot worse” sounds increasingly to me like a psychic binky — more pacifier than reality check. And you may be flattering our democracy. When I look at what’s happening with Jerome Powell, with James Comey, with Mark Kelly, with Elissa Slotkin — the list goes on — and when I contemplate the possible rupture of NATO over Greenland, for tundra’s sake, I do not see meaningful restraints on Trump. You really do?
Bret: Well, here goes the psychic binky. Greenland? Read Abraham Lincoln’s “Spot Resolutions” calling out the pretexts the Polk administration used to start the Mexican-American War. Civil liberties? Think of L.B.J.’s wiretaps of M.L.K. Thuggish ICE officers? Recall Dwight D. Eisenhower and “Operation Wetback,” a quasi-military operation that forcibly deported tens of thousands of Mexicans from the United States.
As for the administration’s legal threats, the bark is worse than the bite. The Comey case would be scary if it hadn’t already fallen apart. The investigation of Powell is a bad joke: Even a Republican like Senator Thom Tillis said he wouldn’t vote for any Trump nominees to the Fed while the legal threat to Powell persisted. I’m not saying any of this isn’t bad. I’m only saying that we’ll survive it because most Americans, including most Republicans, remain faithfully wedded to a democratic system. All we need is a more competent political opposition.
Frank: You marshal compelling examples and make excellent points, but I worry that they add up to a profoundly dangerous complacency. Minimizing the excesses and erratic behavior of Trump’s first term is partly how we arrived at a second one. “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it turns out, wasn’t malady; it was prophecy. And a big flaw in your don’t-get-too-hysterical timeline is its failure to account for the singularity of this president — for the boundlessness of his mendacity, greed, contempt for the law and desire to rule by fear.
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Bret: Trump is president again not because liberals didn’t scream loudly enough. It’s because all they did was scream.
Frank: An alternate take: Trump is president again because Senate Republicans, voting on his second impeachment, chose cowardice over principle. Trump is president again because they all conveniently assumed that he’d committed political suicide with the mayhem of Jan. 6, and so they could shirk their responsibilities to hold him accountable and bar him from the White House forevermore. Trump is president again because Mitch McConnell interred what was left of his dignity. That’s the kind of minimizing I’m talking about.
Bret: Well, that and the Democrats deceived themselves on Joe Biden’s fitness to run for re-election and then nominated a terrible candidate. What’s her name again? Let’s switch topics: Billary! The former president and first lady are in the news for refusing to testify in the House’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. Should they be held in contempt of Congress?
Frank: Kamala Harris. That was her name.
Bret: Oh, right. I voted for her. Through gritted teeth.
Frank: I love your teeth best when they’re gritted, Bret. As for the Clintons, I’m flummoxed, and not only because I wanted to use that word. I, too, am a law-and-order guy, so I generally don’t think you defy subpoenas. That’s how Steve Bannon ended up in the clink. But context matters. These subpoenas aren’t about fact-finding; they’re instruments of harassment. So I understand the Clintons’ position here. Don’t you?
Bret: Sure. I also think the Epstein files should never have been publicly released. The case used to be a true story about a terrible man who abused young women and whose death nobody should mourn. Now it’s turned into an all-purpose conspiracy theory that has tarred a lot of people who are innocent of personal wrongdoing except for having made the mistake of socializing or doing business with Epstein. Maybe the Clintons’ stand will put an end to this, but I doubt it. Like the X-Files, the “truth” will forever be out there.
Frank: To your doubt, add mine. I have some of your same misgivings about the Epstein files. To divulge all the paces of an investigation, including the false starts and dead ends, is to introduce many characters whose reputations will be sullied without reason. Investigative files are a flea market of villains and bystanders, essential conclusions and embarrassing assumptions. And “all-purpose conspiracy theory” nails it. We don’t have lines of inquiry anymore. We have narratives that become out-and-out industries that literally and metaphorically employ all these people who can’t let the enterprise go. They have too much invested in it.
Bret: Too much agreement! Here’s something we can disagree about: I think Marco Rubio is doing a pretty good job as secretary of state. I feel better about how the world under Trump will turn out because Rubio has such a shaping hand in it.
Frank: As a visually impaired human, I can trot out the adage that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Rubio is the Cyclops in this equation — or, rather, in the Trump administration. He makes you feel better, Bret, because the others make you feel so bad. But, yeesh, he has simultaneously done so many jobs — secretary of state, national archivist, national security adviser — that I half expect him to debut a stand-up act at the Trump Kennedy Center, become a place-kicker for the Miami Dolphins and show up with my next DoorDash delivery. There’s apparently a level above and beyond multitasking. Let’s call it Marco-tasking.
Bret: I have a different take on Rubio. Remember when Keegan-Michael Key played Barack Obama’s “anger translator” at a White House correspondents’ dinner, evoking the boiling rage that was hiding beneath Obama’s cool exterior? Rubio’s more like the opposite: He’s Trump’s sense-whisperer. If Venezuela winds up being something more than just an oil play, or if we acquire Greenland through a fair negotiation in which we purchase the territory with the consent of its inhabitants, or if Iran or Cuba are freed from tyranny, it’ll be because Rubio managed to turn his boss’s manias and rages into coherent, defensible policies.
Or maybe I’m putting the wish before the thought.
Frank: I’ll just note the bevy — the bouquet — of “ifs” in that reverie of yours.
Bret: “If” is better as a poem by Kipling. Read anything good lately?
Frank: Indeed. And it was poetic! In a recent article in The Atlantic, Adam Frank described the differences between physics and biology in a way that beautifully captured the wonder and mysteries of the natural world: “Give me a young star, and I can use the reductionist laws of physics to predict that star’s future: It will live a million years rather than a billion years; it will die as a black hole rather than as a white dwarf. But the components of a living organism yield something new and unexpected, a phenomenon called ‘emergence.’ Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some four billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos — like humans — are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.”
Bret: Speaking of “emergence,” since I mentioned the Kipling poem, I may as well quote the first stanza.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise
Democrats, that’s solid advice.
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