Bret Stephens: Frank, we have a lot of deadly serious topics to cover, including the president’s speech Wednesday night. Let’s start with something, uh, less momentous. Do you believe, as former South Dakota first gentleman Bryon Noem apparently does, that “breast is best?”
Frank Bruni: Because I worked for years as a restaurant critic, can I pretend you’re talking about chicken, and can I expound upon the transcendent virtues of the thigh?
Bret: Our colleague Shawn McCreesh has a beautifully reported story from Mr. Noem’s hometown, Castlewood, S.D., which canvases the views of his old neighbors and friends about the tabloid story regarding pictures of Mr. Noem, who, in photos published in The Daily Mail, appears to be wearing a pair of inflated balloons under a tight spandex shirt. Two points stand out for me. First, there’s a lot of sympathy for the Noems’ public embarrassment, which speaks highly of the place and its people. Second, that basic decency sits rather awkwardly with the moralistic hectoring that typifies the politics of so much of the Republican Party today.
Frank: Are you calling Republicans hypocrites? The thought never occurred to me.
Bret: I’m calling some Republicans hypocrites. Those of us who are either philosophical conservatives or classical liberals believe, with John Stuart Mill, in the virtue of “experiments in living” — and low taxes.
Frank: What makes the Noems’ situation so difficult to process and so much to process is that after the pictures’ release, Kristi Noem asked for some compassion, but she offered absolutely none of that in her wretched days as the secretary of Homeland Security. You rightly called out the “moralistic hectoring” of many Republicans, Bret, but her behavior went far beyond and far below that. She reveled in the vilification of Renee Good, of Alex Pretti, baselessly slandering them before their dead bodies were even cold; with a $50,000 gold Rolex on her wrist, she strutted in front of caged men in El Salvador, celebrating their consignment to a hellhole. Incapable of mercy (or, for that matter, decency), she now beseeches it.
Bret: My compassion is 100 percent with Bryon, 0 percent with Kristi: Cross-dressing is fine by me but shooting a 14-month-old dog because it couldn’t hunt — and then boasting about it in a political memoir — is psychotic and despicable, not to mention dumber than buckshot. Everything about her tenure as Homeland Security secretary could be gleaned from that incident.
Also, her taste in watches is terrible: A sporty Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso or a 1960s-era Omega Seamaster De Ville in a 34 mm stainless steel case would have shown actual class.
Frank: Tastelessness and classlessness are the least of my concerns when it comes to President Trump’s collaborators. In any case, the Noems affirm the maxim that nobody can know, from the outside, what goes on inside a marriage, and this episode is a reminder that fetishes come in more shapes and sizes than anyone can imagine. Somewhere in the heartland, there are probably six internet-connected souls who find their maximum joy only when their knees are slathered with cashew butter, they’re wearing Wonder Woman tiaras and the movie “Ishtar” is playing on a TV set in their peripheral vision. We humans are wondrous creatures.
Bret: OK, Frank, the “Ishtar” part was disgusting. Speaking of which, can we discuss the East Wing?
Frank: And now we’re back to tastelessness and classlessness.
Bret: As you know, a federal judge just put a stop to Trump’s efforts to build a Titanic ballroom atop the wreckage of the old East Wing. The legal issues are thorny, since past presidents have, to the best of my knowledge, also remodeled the White House from time to time, including Teddy Roosevelt, who added the West Wing, and Harry Truman, who put in the famous “Truman balcony.” And Trump insists it’s all kosher because rich donors, rather than Congress, are footing the bill.
Frank: Yeah, rich donors purchasing his favor. It’s a ballroom built on bribery. Makes everything OK!
Bret: Just like the “Melania” movie. But even if Trump can win the legal argument, he’s lost the moral and aesthetic argument. The renderings of the new ballroom make it look like it was designed by Borat for a casino in Kazakhstan. And the entire glory of the White House lies in its architectural simplicity and restraint. Assuming it ever gets built, the first thing a Democratic successor should do is tear it down and then pass a law requiring that any major modifications to federal buildings be done with public funds and Congressional approval.
Frank: Let’s divorce “aesthetic” from “moral”; one of the mistakes we Trump critics make is being so offended by — and censorious of — his sheer crudeness that his supporters then dismiss our bigger issues with him as elitist condescension. The ballroom is tacky, yes. But more important, it’s of a piece with his signature on U.S. currency — which is coming soon! — and with the addition of his name to the Kennedy Center and with the military parade and with the rotten rest of it. This is about idolatry, a cult of personality and the replacement of real achievements with vacuous adornments.
Bret: Bad taste and autocratic instincts tend to go together for a reason, because the purpose of autocratic design is to overawe rather than intrigue or delight; to erase beauty, which elicits a sense of humanity and reverence, with largeness, which elicits fear.
Different — but perhaps related — subject: What do you make of the Trump administration’s order, which was just OK’ed by an Obama-appointed federal judge — for the University of Pennsylvania to provide the government with a list of its Jewish employees?
Frank: It makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I find the Trump administration’s actions in this regard disingenuous. Administration officials say they’re doing this in order to identify victims of antisemitism and expose and eradicate antisemitism on college campuses — which certainly exists and is reprehensible — but the same administration welcomes and coddles far-right antisemites as long as they’re in the MAGA tent and beating up on Democrats. I don’t see principle or anything close to it here. I see theatrics and, when it comes to Penn, bullying and an invasion of privacy. If there are Jewish employees and students who want to share stories of antisemitism, encourage them to come forward. Spread the word that you’re all ears. Don’t root them out.
Bret: Agree. Unless you’re Nicholas Winton, Raoul Wallenberg or Chiune Sugihara, please just don’t draw up lists of Jews. The result is probably going to be bad.
Another subject: Birthright citizenship. Trump has been railing against this bedrock even before his first presidency, and now it’s before the Supreme Court. The president even came to hear oral arguments in person, which has got to be some kind of first. Do you think a majority of the justices will side with him this time?
Frank: I am going to answer that with words that may get me ejected and barred forevermore from The Society of Pundits: I have no idea. The Supreme Court has often been a riddle to me, and this Supreme Court confounds me like none before it. So I punt all predictions to people more erudite and perspicacious than I. Which is a bloated way of saying: This one’s all yours, Bret.
Bret: I think the case for birthright citizenship is clear and has been since the court settled the issue in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, though for a contrary take I recommend our readers have a look at Randy Barnett’s and Ilan Wurman’s guest essay in The Times. But I’m going to bet that John Roberts, the chief justice, and Neil Gorsuch, the most independent-minded justice on the bench, are going to side with the Court’s three liberals to protect birthright citizenship. As well they should: To overturn 128 years of precedent could create havoc and legal uncertainty for hundreds of thousands of Americans whose citizenship status would abruptly be thrown into question.
Frank: Bret, let’s turn to Trump’s speech — and, boy, am I using that term generously — about the Iran war. He sought to reassure a skeptical and stressed-out nation that everything was going sensationally, phantasmagorically well. I was not reassured one iota. He sounded like he was winded. He stumbled through words and repeated himself. It was like listening to the final bits of air seep out of a flaccid tire. And his claims of a perfect economy, a perfect country — a perfect president! — made his State of the Union address seem almost modest. What in God’s name was that, Bret?
Bret: As our readers know, I support the war and think it’s been far more successful — and necessary — than critics acknowledge. But, boy, that was a childish speech. Undisciplined, unstructured, uninformative, unimpressive, uninspiring, unpresidential. I learned nothing from it that I hadn’t known before it started, except that Trump somehow thinks that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened by something akin to magic. It was also a signal to what remains of the Iranian regime that they just need to hold on for another two or three weeks and it will be over. A reminder that, even if this is the right war, we’ve got the wrong president.
Frank: I believe that more and more Americans are coming to that conclusion. I mean, they don’t have to be paying close attention to notice Trump’s glaring contradictions. He touts this military endeavor as Operation Epic Fury and yet, per his remarks on Wednesday night, it’s a “little journey to Iran”? That makes it sound like something from a children’s book, in which the hero rides a unicorn into a kaleidoscopic Persian sunset. It’s more like the sundowning of a commander in chief.
Bret: Frank, I know we’re both cheering the Artemis II astronauts on their way to the moon. But we also can’t close this conversation without mentioning Shelly Kittleson, the American journalist who was kidnapped this week in Baghdad by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group that has taken other hostages and subjected them to torture. Kittleson had been previously alerted by the State Department that she was in danger but stayed in her job, a reminder that reporters no less than soldiers take huge risks to do their duty by the people they serve — in Kittleson’s case, her readers. I’m praying for her safe return. And I’m hoping that Americans who are so relentlessly hostile to the profession we’re in gain a measure of appreciation for the courage and sacrifice it can take to bring them the news.
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