Frank Bruni: Bret, let’s start off by setting the record straight. That A.I. image of President Trump in a flowing robe and shawl, bathed in mystical light, with worshipful acolytes gazing up at him? He was not-not-not cosplaying Jesus. He was pantomiming Stevie Nicks in concert. Let us not confuse Resurrection with “Rhiannon.”
Bret Stephens: As George W. Bush said of Trump’s first Inaugural Address: “That was some weird stuff.” Except he used a more pungent word than “stuff.”
Frank: Little did W. know that he was writing a tag line for the next decade of American life. And “weird” doesn’t begin to cover this president’s unraveling. Whom or what is he going to attack next? He has bashed Taylor Swift. He just went after the pope. No beloved icon is safe. He’ll be cursing the ghost of Lassie in a few days.
Bret: The vulgar social-media posts are something he’s been doing since before he became president the first time around, so maybe I’m a little too prone to ignoring them. Part of me thinks he’s crazy; part of me thinks he wants people to think he’s crazy; part of me thinks he wants to drive other people crazy. All three things can be true, I suppose. But my general attitude is that it’s a mistake to allow Trump to goad you into fits of moralizing hysteria. Pay more attention to what he does than to what he says.
Frank: I don’t think it’s an either/or choice, and I think it’s a mistake to become too practiced at shrugging off his depravity — which is a non-hysterical, wholly accurate word for it. I agree that focusing exclusively or excessively on it and hyperventilating is a waste of good breath, but his foul tirades demean the presidency, demean the country — demean every one of us — and it’s important that we never forget that. We can’t let those tirades become the new idiom for political discourse; we can’t pretend they haven’t diminished our standing in the world. “That’s just Trump being Trump” is an inadequate response when, for example, he posts a video of himself as a pilot dumping torrents of excrement on protesters. (That was his A.I. gift to us in October.)
Bret: I agree. Yet 77 million Americans voted for him. That’s the country we live in. And the job for his opponents is to decide whether the best response is to scold him like some late-Victorian schoolmarm, to get in the mud with him like a soon-to-be-former California governor, or simply to offer the country a more attractive program for guiding and governing the country. Other than Rahm Emanuel, I’m not seeing enough of the latter from the president’s opponents.
Oh, and speaking of California, isn’t it wild that its next governor might be a Republican?
Frank: That is some very weird … stuff.
Bret: At some point, it becomes rational to conclude that our entire political system is on acid.
Frank: California is of course a perfect cautionary tale for Democrats, because the refusal of some Democratic candidates to step out of the open primary there and put party before individual ambition is what could divide voters so thinly among those candidates that their Republican opponents prevail in an indisputably blue state. The Democrats should take a lesson from Hungary and the defeat of Viktor Orban. That was achieved in part by his critics putting aside their differences with one another so they could coalesce around one Orban alternative, Peter Magyar, and loft him to power. When the stakes are grave, unity is paramount; it’s a large part of how Joe Biden prevailed over Trump in 2020. Fingers crossed for 2028.
Bret: Intriguingly, the Trump-endorsed Republican front-runner in the race in California, Steve Hilton, is the son of Hungarian immigrants to Britain who Anglicized their name from Hircksac to Hilton. Hilton then worked for David Cameron, the former U.K. prime minister and the very embodiment of a Tory toff, before coming to the U.S. and recasting himself as a MAGA Republican. Is this a great country, or what?
Frank: Is there an option between “great” and “what”?
Bret: As for the race itself, a lot depends on whether the second-place finisher in the “jungle primary” — so called because it’s a nonpartisan primary in which the top two vote-getters go on to contest the general election, irrespective of their party affiliation — is another Republican. If so, California would get its first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger left office 15 years ago. If not, the top Democrat in the primary will almost certainly win. Happily, that person will not be Eric Swalwell.
Frank: I can’t say — and don’t want to say — anything in defense of Swalwell, but I do sort of feel a need to point out that while he’s issuing the pro forma, all-purpose, hazy denials of allegations of sexual assault and sexual abuse, he quickly exited the stage. He is not, like a certain Stevie Nicks impersonator I know, grandly and perversely fashioning himself as some political martyr whom his followers must avenge. Among Democrats, shame still exists. That may not have the makings of a bumper sticker for 2026 or 2028, but it’s something!
Bret: I once wrote a column about Trump and the annihilation of shame. It was inspired by the death of Charles Van Doren, the notorious quiz show cheater who spent the rest of his life in quiet atonement, not accepting a penny to work as a consultant in the Hollywood movie about him. “It was once the useful role of conservatives,” I wrote, “to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling Stop. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump.”
Frank: Trump has indeed annihilated shame. He has annihilated humility. He has annihilated decency. He’s the annihilator of every component of character that the Republican Party once proudly — and, in many instances, disingenuously — claimed to champion, and yet an overwhelming majority of Republican leaders and lawmakers chose power under Trump over honor or self-respect. That’s the real heartache of this era. It’s no surprise to encounter a character as reprehensible as Trump. The world is lousy with Trumps. What’s shocking is how many Republicans bowed to him — and how quickly and meekly they did so. And, yes, I’m looking at you, Lindsey Graham.
Bret: And yet something tells me that if Democrats had to twist themselves into knots to defend a Democratic president against accusations of inappropriate behavior and baldfaced lying, they’d do it. In a heartbeat.
Frank: It’s fair to remember Bill Clinton, but it’s not remotely fair to equate him with Trump.
Bret: True, but Bubba set a precedent. What’s interesting to me is how to set a counter-precedent. You mentioned Viktor Orban, Trump’s BFF in Europe, finally being thrown out on his ear after 16 years in power. Other than the importance of coalescing around a single opposition figure, what other lessons can we glean from that?
Frank: For me there are two biggies. The first is that dissent will find a way. Orban and his allies put a lot of effort into suppressing opposition voices, censoring contrary ideas, enforcing loyalty. They traveled even farther down that road than Trump and his allies have (so far). But the Hungarians grief-stricken by what Orban was doing to their country found their megaphones anyway — and on social media, no less. What a heartening reminder that those platforms aren’t all bad.
The second lesson is that reality catches up to most politicians. A leader can breed scapegoats like so many rabbits, proclaim hallucinatory glory and follow the rest of the authoritarian playbook, but if people’s daily lives are falling far short of their expectations, they will hunger — and, if still able to, vote — for change. What do you think?
Bret: The lesson, as I see it, is that populism can never deliver on its fantastic promises: to insulate a national economy from the global one, while maintaining prosperity; to represent the will of the people, while persecuting a large share of the people who oppose populist policies; to champion “democracy” through illiberal means; to pretend you’re speaking for the forgotten man as you grow fat, rich, and arrogant in power. By the way, that’s as true of left-wing populism as it is of the populism of the right. As someone with some family ties to Hungary, I’m just glad to see Orban gone.
Frank: Ding dong, as they sang in “The Wizard of Oz.” Speaking of populists — or at least populists-come-lately — is it just me, or is JD Vance not living his best life these days? Thanks to Trump’s genius epiphany that he should call Pope Leo a dummy and an ingrate, Vance has been drawn into lecturing the head of the Roman Catholic Church — which he joined just seven years ago — on proper theology and morality. What a suicidal cocktail of arrogance, idiocy and apostasy. And explain to me, Bret, how Vance is assigned to lead doomed peace talks in Pakistan while Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is watching mixed martial arts with Trump in Miami?
Bret: The scuttlebutt is that Trump has more than once asked his richest donors who they prefer as his successor. Overwhelmingly, they prefer the secretary of state, and apparently the president does, too. The line I hear is that “Vance has the base but Rubio has the swing,” as in the swing vote. Which may explain why Trump sent Vance to negotiate with the Iranians: He was setting him up to fail.
In this, by the way, Trump isn’t wrong. A Rubio presidency would be fine by me, and represent something of a restoration for the “normie” Republican Party of old. A Vance presidency, by contrast, would make us … yearn for that stability and sanity of the Trump years. Your thoughts?
Frank: Rubio’s cheerleading for Trump has often gone beyond the pale, so if you’re asking me if I feel all warm and fuzzy about a Rubio presidency, the answer is an emphatic no. Do I prefer him to Vance? Well, of course. That’s like asking if I’d rather eat thumbtacks or shards of arsenic-coated glass. I’ll take the tacks, but they’re still going to tear me up inside.
Also? I love this “asked his richest donors.” What a way to govern: plebiscite by plutocrat.
Bret: I know how much our readers are going to love it when I say: Given the choice, I’ll take plutocracy over populism any day.
Frank: Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.”
His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying.
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