Frank Bruni: Bret, you just wrote a compelling column calling President Trump’s truce with Iran less a deal than a debacle. I couldn’t agree more. But doesn’t it perfectly fit this presidency’s pattern? Trump blusters about restored American greatness — about our country being the “hottest” in the world, whatever that means — while making it look smaller, sillier and stupider by the day.
Bret Stephens: Thanks, Frank. It wasn’t an easy column for me to write, because I supported the war from the outset and thought the cause was necessary and just. But facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. And the central fact of our time is that we are led — I am using that verb in the loosest sense — by a man whose idea of courage is bullying, whose idea of honor is knavery, whose idea of loyalty is convenience, whose idea of patriotism is self-idolization, and whose idea of principle is anything that suits his need and his pleasure. Now excuse me while I throw up.
Frank: The president as purgative. You’ve identified Trump’s most reliable function. You’ve also flattered him — with “led” and “idea” both. Trump doesn’t have ideas. He has only his instincts — base ones — and his insecurities, which are titanic.
Bret: Except his titanic insecurities never seem to sink him, only the rest of us.
Frank: Too true. I certainly feel like I’m drowning. I’m also struck by how telling Trump’s overreach is. By how clearly it exposes those insecurities. A man confident in his country’s affluence and ingenuity doesn’t clutch the blankie of tariffs as tightly as he did, doesn’t vilify immigrants in such an overwrought and indiscriminate fashion, doesn’t demand to be augmented by swaths of territory the size of Greenland, and doesn’t summon latter-day gladiators to the White House to beam at him as they bloody each other. Happy Birthday, Mr. President.
Bret: I couldn’t bring myself to watch. But I’m struck by the way in which authoritarian pretensions and atrocious taste always seem to go hand in hand. Maybe it’s that moral ugliness tends so often to produce aesthetic ugliness. Whatever the case, the job of the next president will be to erase every vestige of Trump from the White House and any other federal property. Getting rid of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center was only a start; I look forward to seeing the East Wing restored to exactly how it used to be.
Frank: There’s infinite erasing to do. It includes the Presidential Walk of Fame — that asinine new gallery in the White House that gives Trump’s puerile take on the glories and follies of his predecessors. Then there’s that infernal arch. But those gauche indulgences won’t be the end of it, Bret. He has now crested 80, and as our news-side colleague Katie Rogers wrote this week, that bothers him intensely. He may soon get a midterm comeuppance. Then the clock on his presidency starts ticking more and more loudly. Imagine the self-tributes he’ll need as medicine for all of that. We can file them under octogenarian onanism.
Bret: Er, yuck. But let me ask you about Iran: If this deal is as bad as I fear it is — marking an ignominious defeat in the Middle East — will it hurt Trump politically the way that Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan hurt him? Or might Americans shrug and move on, especially if the price of oil continues to fall and the markets continue to rise? In other words, will Trump pay no political price for his foreign policy fecklessness?
Frank: You’ve been eavesdropping on my nightmares again, haven’t you?
Bret: Yes, thanks to Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Frank: Trump never pays the price he should. He makes sure of that. He’s so shameless and emphatic — no, operatic — in his insistence that total failure is nonpareil triumph that most of his supporters question and then dismiss any serious stirrings of disappointment they feel. Gullibility is so much easier than skepticism, and it keeps you tucked comfily in your tribe. Trump also benefits from our thoroughly polluted information ecosystem: His loyalists dwell in a kingdom of propaganda to which you, me and this exchange of ours aren’t granted access.
Bret: Nor do we particularly want to go there.
Frank: And Trump fleetly moves on to a new boast, a fresh provocation, a surprise plot twist. He understands that the audience — including critics like us — can’t dwell for long on the last episode and the previous season if the story line has serpentined in uncharted directions.
Bret: True. Except you’re also looking at a Republican Party that, ever so gingerly, knows that the country is souring on Trump and also knows that, one way or the other, it’ll soon have to move past him, too. The great question is, how?
Frank: There are hundreds of pages of implicit answers in a book that was published Tuesday. It purports to be the writer’s soulful self-examination, but it’s undoubtedly just as much an audition for a promotion, an epically bloated campaign pamphlet, as most political memoirs that appear during the prelude to the next presidential election are. Surely you can guess the title and the author?
Bret: “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu”? Oh, never mind. I’m guessing you mean JD Vance’s exploration of his religious epiphany, “Communion,” the one that, in his mind if no one else’s, makes him competent to lecture Pope Leo XIV on the finer points of theology. Amirite?
Frank: Ding-ding-ding! You get a free copy of the Trump Bible! The subtitle of the vice president’s book is “Finding My Way Back to Faith,” but, of course, the proper translation of that is “Finding My Way Back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as Resident Rather Than Sycophant.”
Bret: Vance may be the only person in the administration who makes Trump look good. I mean, other than Pete Hegseth. Or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Or Howard Lutnick. Or Linda McMahon. Or, well, my point is: better an honest hypocrite than a pious opportunist.
Frank: These are our choices? Repellent as Vance is, he’s going to be fascinating to watch over the next two years. All vice presidents who try to trade up must figure out how to deal with the baggage of a boss they supposedly advised and publicly praised. Kamala Harris never managed to; remember that disastrous interview on “The View” when she said she couldn’t name anything she would have handled differently than Joe Biden had?
But there’s baggage and then there’s the landfill of toxic refuse that Trump will leave behind. Does Vance have the hazmat suit for that? Can he Houdini his way out of the cuffs Trump has slapped on him to yet another political identity? He already went from talking as if Trump were the Devil incarnate to genuflecting every time Trump shuffles within 100 feet of him. Now what? God help me, I suppose I’ll have to pour myself a big chalice of red wine and do some serious communing with “Communion.”
Bret: Are you really going to read it?
Frank: As eagerly and raptly as I did “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” which was Hegseth’s most recent and totally essential literary outing.
Bret: As H.L. Mencken said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. But I still can’t quite believe this country would ever make Vance president. Then again, he’s the automatic front-runner for the Republican nomination, and he proved in his vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz that he’s as verbally dexterous as he is ideologically malleable. His Catholicism may also help him politically, since about half of all American Catholics identify as Republican. And he’ll try to use his none-too-subtle opposition to the Iran war as a way of attracting a growing segment of isolationist conservatives.
All of which, unfortunately, reminds me of another apposite quotation, this one from Huck Finn: “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
Frank: Proust, Mencken, Twain. Now you’re just showing off, Bret. But I get it. Trump staged a tacky pageant of brawn and brutality (and corporate sponsorships!) with those birthday cage fights and their ill-tempered participants, including the contender whose victory speech was the out-of-nowhere proclamation: “Michelle Obama is a man!” You’re trying to tug the pendulum of public discourse back toward civilization and sanity. Good luck with that.
In any event, can you give me — give all of us — something reassuring and positive to mull?
Bret: Here’s hope: On Saturday, I was at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to watch Morocco play Brazil in the World Cup. Two strong, proud, exceptionally skillful teams that played each other to a 1-1 draw. What especially moved me was how joyful and good-natured the fans were, not just inside the stadium but also in the long, sweltering lines to catch the bus ride back to Manhattan. All without a hint of malice, much less violence, toward the other side.
Once we were back in New York, we found ourselves at an impromptu watch party on 66th and Broadway as the Knicks clinched the championship after another unbelievable come-from-behind win, and the city erupted in spontaneous, almost indescribable joy. And so, for a couple of hours, soccer brought two continents together, and basketball brought an entire city together, and nobody needed to think for even a second about Iran, or Trump, or Vance, or every other hideous thing that occupies so much of our mind space. A fleeting moment, but one worth lingering over before regular programming resumes.
Source image by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
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