Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. We seem to be sliding back into war with Iran. Do you see any good outcome? Or, at least, a least-bad outcome?
Frank Bruni: Yeesh, Bret, you really know how to perk up a guy’s day, don’t you?
Bret: Would you rather discuss interest-rate policy?
Frank: In honor of “The Odyssey” — Christopher Nolan’s new movie adaptation opens this weekend — I’m going to describe that as a Scylla-and-Charybdis choice.
Bret: Listen, Penelope, your suitor is waiting for his answer.
Frank: Fine. I’ll abandon my loom long enough to give you a response. No, I don’t see any good outcome, because whatever happens over the next weeks or months can’t erase or rewrite the, um, odyssey that brought us to this wretched juncture. And the world has witnessed how poorly President Trump plans (by which I mean he doesn’t), how little he understands, how profligate he can be with our country’s (diminished) arsenal and what a gallery of fools he has assembled and commands.
On top of which, I find no reason for confidence that Trump will achieve his erratically and inconsistently stated aims, which included making sure Iran never got a nuclear weapon. But, please, tell me this cloud has a silver lining. Deliver us to Ithaca.
Bret: Dealing with Iran is a serious foreign-policy problem. Dealing with Trump’s brain may be an insurmountable one.
If we had only the first problem, I’d advise a normal president to target what remains of Iran’s nuclear installations and at the same time escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz in convoys in defense of the age-old principle of freedom of the seas. All this would be a difficult military challenge but not an impossible one. What isn’t solvable is an erratic president who issues threats he withdraws, signs cease-fire agreements he doesn’t appear to have read, claims he’s indifferent to political and economic considerations until he caves to both, and lacks not only a coherent strategic concept but an elementary understanding of what strategy is. All of which gives this hawk a fear of flying, to borrow a phrase.
Frank: Our foul-feathered president has clipped those wings of yours, huh?
Bret: It’s instilled a certain sobriety, if I can switch metaphors.
Frank: There’s one thing (and maybe only one thing) Trump has figured out, and it’s that the Iran war is not redounding to his or his Republican abettors’ political benefit. Quite the opposite. That’s why he’s spending even more energy than before on what I think is the single scariest and most significant story line of the months between now and the midterms in November: his effort to convince Americans that our elections are wholly corrupted — in favor of Democrats, of course — and that the results can’t be trusted. He’s expected to rant about that in his prime-time television address on Thursday.
Bret: To adapt Thomas Brackett Reed’s great line about his fellow politicians, every time Trump opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum of human knowledge.
Frank: By that reasoning and arithmetic, we’re in negative integers at this point.
Never in the past 50 years have we seen anything from an American president like Trump’s determination to undermine voters’ faith in democracy itself, which is fine with him if it’s the only way to hold on to power and get what he wants. It’s a degree of ruthlessness and a magnitude of narcissism that add up to a kind of political sociopathy. I’ve written this before and stand by it: He’ll burn the whole thing down if that’s best for him. He’ll gladly rule over ashes, just as long as he’s the one ruling.
Bret: I don’t want to overdo it in the fancy quotation department, but you’re reminding me of what Abraham Lincoln, in the first major speech he ever gave, warned would be the undoing of the Republic: a demagogue of overweening ambition who, “nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” The only remedy, young Abe added, was for “the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”
To put it in a more modern idiom, we’re screwed.
Frank: It’s fascinating and revealing that Trump, who can’t hold most thoughts for more than a nanosecond and contradicts himself with every labored breath, has been as patient and constant as Penelope in weaving the fantasy that malign, election-rigging forces are out to get him. (They’re doing a terrible job; last I checked, Republicans held the White House and both chambers of Congress.) And he has used so many different threads: fictions about illegal voting, claptrap about voting machines, the alchemizing of violent Jan. 6 rioters into valiant martyrs.
Over recent months, he has been firing or neutralizing officials who oversee elections, dispatching federal investigators to Georgia to rummage through documents from almost six years ago, issuing executive orders that demand state voter rolls and assert federal control over mail-in voting. All of this is methodical and coordinated in a manner that little else that Trump does is. That tells you how invested he is in it. And it’s terrifying.
Bret: I agree. It’s dangerous and despicable. And the so-called SAVE America Act, which he’s desperate to jam through Congress, is a recipe for disenfranchising millions of Americans who can’t find their birth certificates or don’t have a U.S. passport or other means to prove their citizenship. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s too much to insist on some common-sense reforms to increase public confidence in elections, like asking voters to show up to the polls with a valid ID or abolishing the practice of vote harvesting by unions or other third parties. Trump’s demagoguery is one big reason voters have lost confidence in elections, but too many reforms in the name of expanded access have just led to unnecessary uncertainty.
Frank: I hear you. This is one of the many fronts on which Trump has smartly detected misgivings among Americans and, instead of sensibly addressing those, supersized them into a state of paranoia that he can then exploit to his advantage.
Bret: Another topic on my mind is the recent killings by ICE agents of two people, one in Texas and another in Maine, during vehicle stops. At least in this case, the Department of Homeland Security ordered a pause on most vehicle stops, which would be progress of a sort. But it’s not nearly enough, and Trump is trying to undo it. I’m for strong border security and immigration reform, not a campaign of intimidation and terror against the honorable and defenseless.
Frank: I’m horrified by what indeed appear to be rash, avoidable killings. I’m also struck by how differently the Trump administration and Democrats seem to read the politics of this. Democrats believe that most voters are disgusted with — and will rebel against — the behavior of federal agents in so many of the cities that ICE has descended on and brutalized. But the administration has once again been ramping up raids and deportations, or trying to. Is this self-defeating obstinacy, Bret? What do you make of it?
Bret: I think we’re dealing with a case of true believers: something Trump wants done irrespective of how it plays politically. Of course, he knows that Joe Biden’s lax border policies helped him regain the White House. And he knows that securing the border is one of the few genuine and broadly acknowledged accomplishments of his administration. But he’s taken immigration enforcement to a level of cruelty and caprice that even most Republicans I know don’t support. They know how vital undocumented workers are to scores of industries, like restaurants and farming. They’re also able to make common-sense distinctions between deporting genuine criminals and arresting hapless housemaids, construction workers and meatpackers.
Someday I hope every American looks back on Trump’s immigration crackdown with shame.
Frank: I worry that we administered the last rites to shame when Trump, his children and their hangers-on started using his current stint in the White House as a bejeweled A.T.M. vomiting crisp million-dollar bills into their greedy hands and Republicans … said nothing.
Bret: Most recently a $2 million payment from a South Korean company as part of a “nonrefundable development fee” to a Trump holding company for what The Times reports is “a still-unannounced golf course project.” But let’s not call it corruption because that word doesn’t quite capture the stench of an open sewer.
Frank: You made reference to a cruelty, regarding immigrants, that “even most Republicans I know don’t support.” They sure haven’t made that clear.
Bret: They do. Very quietly. Often on golf carts.
Frank: At the top of my long list of sorrows and disillusionments is how many people in public office have sacrificed their consciences on the altar of Trump’s favor. Mustn’t anger this vengeful god, no matter how thoroughly you debase yourself. Lindsey Graham tragically epitomized the Faustian bargain so many of them made. In your most recent column, Bret, you did a typically eloquent job of trying to understand — and to help the rest of us understand — how Graham rationalized that calculation and perhaps divined virtue in it. I do agree that he meant well. But he, like Trump, became too enamored of power for power’s sake and too easily shrugged off his own compromises, the number and nature of which were shameful.
Bret: I used to be very critical of Graham’s abrupt switch from Trump scold to minion. I just think it’s important to recognize that Ukraine — and therefore the world — is safer today because Graham did what it took to retain influence with the president and help persuade him not to abandon the country. Some devil’s bargains are worth taking.
Frank: If the midterm results rebuff Trump, do Republicans unshackle and ungag themselves? How much and how soon?
Bret: It’s not going to happen next year, even if Republicans get drubbed in the midterms. It won’t happen after Trump leaves office, either, when he can still make or break Republican political careers with his endorsements. It won’t happen after his funeral, when Republicans will eulogize him as the cosmic love child of George Washington, Jesse Ventura and Jesus Christ. But it might happen in a generation or two. If we’re lucky.
Frank: I guess when you bury your scruples as deep as Republicans have since Trump won their party’s presidential nomination in 2016, the excavation takes decades. How immeasurably sad. Can you provide some compensatory uplift and give me and readers something to feel good about?
Bret: Anyone whose memory of 1980s MTV is still vivid will almost certainly know, word for word, the lyrics to Bonnie Tyler’s ecstatic outpouring of pathos, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (better known to a friend of mine as “Total Eclipse of All Art”). So nobody should miss Alex Williams’s brilliant obituary in The Times for Tyler, who died last week in Portugal at 75. Among other things I didn’t know, the song had been written by the hitmaker Jim Steinman with the singer Meat Loaf in mind, but the big man had the bad luck of having temporarily lost his voice, so the track went instead to Tyler, with her “gravelly voice that could match Rod Stewart or Kim Carnes pebble for pebble.” Alex’s description of the song and the music video that went with it is one for the ages:
Slowly and inexorably, momentum builds to climax after climax, during which Ms. Tyler’s surging vocals, dancing on the edge of camp, seem like they could melt the microphone: “Together we can take it to the end of the line — your love is like a shadow on me all of the time.”
The accompanying video, extravagant even by 1980s standards, was shot in a former asylum in Surrey, England. Conjuring a mood of gothic horror with ninjas, half-clad football players and altar boys with glowing eyes mixed in — “turn around, bright eyes,” indeed — it seemed to play once an hour on MTV, at the height of that network’s influence.
Have you ever seen a more perfectly placed “indeed,” Frank? Indeed, you have not.
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