Graham Platner isn’t my ideal Senate candidate. Not even close. I’m deeply troubled by the thinness of his political experience, by the primacy of raw anger in his appeal to voters and by the oddities and ugliness, from a Nazi tattoo to a fondness for “gay” and “gayest” as put-downs, in his not-so-distant past. It’s a lot to overlook.
But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November. I’d do it without any joy and without any hesitation, because he’s a Democrat running against a Republican and I haven’t been kidding around when I’ve said that President Trump has no respect for democracy, no regard for the truth, no patience for Americans who don’t bow to him and no limits to his desire to exploit the presidency for his and his minions’ glorification and enrichment. I can’t recognize the profound moral offense and extreme danger of Trump and then sit out the election or cast a vote that potentially helps his party, which has abetted or ignored his authoritarian designs, win either chamber of Congress. That would be irresponsible, nonsensical and perilous.
But do other voters think the same way? Is their frequently articulated disdain for Trump just a bunch of colorful and cathartic words or a genuine cause for action, for uncomfortable choices, for not letting the perfect be the enemy of the Platner? That question hovers over the coming midterms even more boldly and consequentially than it did over the presidential elections of 2016, 2020 and 2024, because since January 2025, Trump has revealed himself and his agenda as never before. He has also given Americans every reason to expect even worse from the remainder of his current term — if there are no Democratic roadblocks and he rages without restraint.
Will they vote accordingly? Will Democrats? Around the country, in key Senate and House races, they’ll be presented with some Democratic nominees who are more progressive or moderate than they are and who have discrete positions that unsettle them, individual warts that offend them, biographies that aren’t to their liking. It is ever thus, and Platner’s emergence last week as the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine is a reminder of that.
But this time around, the risks of being turned off and turning away are much greater than usual. There’s a kind of reckoning at hand. Either Trump is the threat that his impassioned detractors have made him out to be and they’ll cast ballots that reflect that or they won’t, because the specter of an unimpeded, full-throttle Trump actually pales next to their quarrels with and pique at Democratic candidates they dislike. He’s not all that terrifying to them after all.
In my newsletter a week ago, I pushed back at any Democratic overconfidence about the midterms, noting all the wild cards in play over the next six months. I mentioned ongoing gerrymandering, and on Wednesday, the Supreme Court further gutted the Voting Rights Act, a decision that could clear the way for new, more Republican-friendly congressional maps in several states, including Louisiana and Tennessee. Around the same time as that ruling, Florida finalized plans for an aggressive new gerrymander.
But I also warned about tensions within the Democratic Party and whether the outcomes of primaries in crucial states could have a negative impact on party enthusiasm and turnout. Take Michigan, a swing state that Democrats must win to wrest control of the Senate. The Democratic primary there, to be held in August, is a competitive three-way race between Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed, who seems to have gained momentum, is farther to the left than many Michigan Democrats and has infuriated many Jewish voters by campaigning with the left-wing influencer Hasan Piker, who once said that Hamas was “a thousand times better” than Israel. El-Sayed generates reactions strong enough that I could easily see some Michigan Democrats and independents refusing to vote for him if he’s the party’s Senate nominee. I could also see some refusing to vote for another candidate if he’s not. Would the members of either group be OK with how that benefits Trump?
Democratic leaders have identified Texas as a plausible opportunity to flip a Senate seat from red to blue; a recent poll by Texas Public Opinion Research bolstered that thinking by showing the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, with a slight lead over either of his possible Republican opponents, who are headed to a runoff on May 26. But Talarico’s victory in the Democratic primary in early March came after a nasty battle with his rival, Jasmine Crockett, some of whose supporters accused Talarico of racially bigoted comments. Will they nonetheless turn out for him in November? They should if they see Trump as the greater evil. What they wind up doing hinges partly on the strength of that conviction.
If I had my way, I’d elevate moderate Democrats in every state and district that’s not firmly in the red or blue column and that’s genuinely up for grabs. I concur with an important essay by the editorial board of The Times in October that laid out the wisdom of that approach: “Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today.” For that reason among others, El-Sayed wouldn’t be my pick to face off against the Republican nominee in Michigan. Still, I’d vote for him — with a heavy heart — if I lived in Michigan and he made it to the general election.
And I worry that Platner is a bigger gamble than Janet Mills, the Maine governor, who essentially ceded the Democratic nomination to him last week, would have been. That’s largely because he has never held elected office and the skeletons tumbling out of his closet make him vulnerable. But it’s also because he campaigned more or less to Mills’s left.
I have separate misgivings about Platner’s character and about his ability to deliver for the economically anxious Americans whom he vigorously and rightly champions. But now that he’s the presumptive Democratic nominee, I’m behind him, for one reason that overrides many reservations: He’s not Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who is running for a sixth term and who, despite her reputation for moderation, has shown herself to be an undependable check on Trump. The contest — about the balance of power in Congress — pits someone who has never coddled our dangerous president against a coward. And the costs of such cowardice have risen much too high.
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For the Love of Sentences
Every so often I offer the psychic balm of a celebration of sentences minus politics and Trump. That’s the case this week.
On the MS NOW website, Soraya Nadia McDonald chose an apt metaphor for “Michael,” the new biopic about Michael Jackson: “The movie works much like a plastic surgeon, nipping and tucking at narrative and memory, obscuring the unsavory, until what’s left is a misshapen simulacrum, one that elides what we all know comes later.” (Thanks to Fred Kraps of Prescott, Ariz., for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Will Leitch checked in on Bob Dylan, who turns 85 this month: “He does not fill massive arenas like the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen. He has no Eagles-style residency at Las Vegas’s Sphere. You will not see him in the Super Bowl halftime show. Dylan plays in Dothan, Ala.; in Tyler, Texas; in Shakopee, Minn. He plays the towns that make up the America he has been writing about for nearly 70 years. You don’t have to be wealthy to see Dylan play. You don’t even have to live in a big city. He will come to you.” (Dick Chady, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
In The Times, Lindsay Zoladz reviewed “The Great Divide,” a new album by Noah Kahan: “Of the most prominent American dude singer-songwriters currently walking in the shadow of Bruce Springsteen, Kahan sounds more convincingly tortured than Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff but less likely than Zach Bryan to get in a fistfight.” (Tracy Hayes, Dallas)
Also in The Times, Melissa Kirsch happened upon the northern lights: “Against a canvas of total darkness, something like an acid cityscape sprang up around our car, electric green towers and skyscrapers, spanning the space between the road and heaven.” (Katie Enos, Andover, Mass.)
Callie Holtermann profiled Jamie Ding, a New Jersey man who recently triumphed on “Jeopardy!” to the tune of more than $880,000: “When he won a game, he looked pleasantly surprised, as if he had been given an unusually good free sample at Trader Joe’s.” (David R. Wohl, Tucson, Ariz.)
And Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.” (Nadine Granoff, Washington, D.C., and Carolyn Villemez, Gaithersburg, Md., among others)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Deborah Aarts recognized how lucrative for bookstores lust is. “You could snicker at the heaving bosoms or thrusting buttocks of it all,” she wrote. “Or you could pay attention to an economic juggernaut that’s carrying the publishing industry on its (tautly rippled) back.” (Kathy Martin, Spring Valley, Ill.)
In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael Klein reported on the restaurateur Stephen Starr’s decision to take an attention-getting 100-layer lasagna off the menu at the Philadelphia restaurant Borromini: “In test after test, Starr said it wasn’t quite right. It became his Great White Whale. (‘Call me béchamel’ could be the opening sentence of this saga.)” (Kelly Welch, Newtown Square, Pa.)
And on the Wordsmith website, Anu Garg chose circumlocution as the word of the day: “It’s a fancy word for beating around the bush. In ‘Little Dorrit’ (1855-1857), Charles Dickens gave us the Circumlocution Office, a government department devoted less to action than to obstruction. As he put it, it excelled in ‘How not to do it.’ A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but bureaucracies have always preferred scenic routes.” (Peter Stangl, Palo Alto, Calif.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
Bonus Regan Picture!
We’re not the only creatures that turn their faces toward the sun. That enjoy the tingle of a warming epidermis. That have a complicated, contradictory relationship with heat.
When the mercury crests 70, my Regan will sometimes refuse to take a walk of more than 200 feet. But then, perhaps half an hour later, she’ll agitate to go outside and she’ll choose a patch of the driveway or backyard for bathing in the bright light. Here she is recently, minus the lawn chair, sunglasses and piña colada that a more doting, generous human caretaker clearly would have given her. It’s a wonder she puts up with me.
Retire These Words!
I’ve never been a big fan of the phrase (or concept of) toxic masculinity. It paints with too broad a brush. It can be heard by boys as an indictment for a crime that they never committed or as a diagnosis of a latent, lurking illness.
But I also have a lexicographic quibble with the first half of it. Ever since “toxic masculinity” took root in the culture, “toxic” made like a weed, growing from conspicuous to pervasive to ubiquitous, which is “pervasive” with a graduate degree.
Trying to describe a problem or condition as insidious? Call it toxic. Is it intrinsic, systemic? Trot out “toxic.” There are more toxins in our current language than in a Superfund site.
In 2018, Oxford Dictionaries made “toxic” its international word of the year, a designation that has always confused me, in the sense that it sometimes seems to celebrate a term’s ascent and other times seems to rue its wearying faddishness. In the case of toxic, I think Oxford was sounding a siren.
Or at least should have been, judging by what I’ve seen since — “toxic” here, “toxic” everywhere. In just the past six months, I’ve read articles in major American newspapers about toxic flattery and about toxic confidence. Those constructions join a toxic compendium noteworthy for its length and abundance of oxymorons or oxymoron-adjacent couplings: toxic productivity (in which everyone is too focused on output), toxic positivity (a.k.a. forced cheer), toxic leadership, toxic resilience, toxic empathy, toxic validation.
“Toxic” has traveled from clever conceit to facile cheat. Call a problem “toxic” and call it a day.
But toxic’s day is done. Time to detox.
“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. The previous installment, about “Trump derangement syndrome,” appeared in this edition of the newsletter.
The post Are Democrats Scared Enough of Trump to Defeat Him? appeared first on New York Times.
