Frank Bruni: I suppose it’s only the latest sign of a morally berserk age, but while two ostensibly serious Republican senators — John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — just abandoned their unconvincing auditions for a new “Profiles in Courage” and blessed Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general, Washington’s U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, of all fruitcakes, earned her own chapter by truly tangling with President Trump over his self-serving claims of Reflecting Pool vandalism. Help me make sense of this, Bret.
Bret Stephens: I predicted a few weeks ago that Cornyn, at least, would vote to confirm Blanche, on the theory that the alternatives were all worse: Trump could keep Blanche in place as an acting A.G., further undermining the Senate’s advise-and-consent function, or install someone even worse than Blanche. Paging Matt Gaetz.
As for Pirro dropping those absurd charges against a former Olympic athlete for supposedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool — and telling Trump to his face that Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, was misleading him, as our news-side colleagues have reported — what can I say? Good for her. Somehow not surprising that what little courage there is in this administration comes from a woman.
Frank: A woman — and here’s another thought I never expected to express — following in the intrepid footsteps of … Marjorie Taylor Greene. Trump corrupts and debases almost everything and everyone he draws within 500 feet of. Maybe Pirro and Greene are exceptions that prove the rule.
Bret: Here’s my very stereotypical, grain-of-truth, feel-free-to-contradict-me observation on the proverbial battle of the sexes: Men tend to define themselves according to their proximity to power; women according to their independence from it.
Frank: I love that, Bret! And while people often indulge in rosy generalizations about women in power — pretty prognostications about more generous social welfare programs that ignore, say, Margaret Thatcher — I do think you’re onto something.
Bret: My all-time favorite quote attributed to Thatcher: “Being powerful is like being a lady: If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” Sorry, go on.
Frank: She’s right. A true victory is one you needn’t gloat about, and a person with real confidence isn’t flexing all the time. What, then, to make of Abdul El-Sayed? In the homestretch of his campaign, he posted a biceps-forward video of himself huffing triumphantly up a gym climbing wall. He hung out poolside in Detroit with Hasan Piker, beefcake bros defiantly reuniting despite all the legit pushback to their alliance. El-Sayed showed a Politico reporter his Whoop fitness app as proof of how utterly serene he was as voters headed to the polls. Look, Ma, no sweat! I don’t understand the strategy of that. And I don’t think we’d accept anything analogous from a female politician.
Bret: El-Sayed may have beat Haley Stevens, his centrist opponent in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, but he did so by a much, much smaller margin than most of the polls suggested. It makes me wonder whether a lot of voters didn’t sour on him precisely because of the Macho Man affect. Of course, I would have preferred if they had soured on him for better reasons, like his D.S.A.-inspired pie-in-the-sky platform, or the polling evidence that he is much less likely than Stevens to defeat Mike Rogers, his Republican opponent, in November, or the fact that he scares the hell out of a lot of reliably Democratic Jewish voters.
Frank: This contest — or, at least, the coverage of it — has driven me crazy, because it doesn’t yield as tidily and definitively to morals about the moment or the Democratic Party as many analysts want it to. Apart from an arrogance that he hid less and less well as his polling numbers climbed higher and higher, El-Sayed was a much, much better communicator than Stevens — smoother, more forceful, more charismatic. After all, he’d hosted a Crooked Media podcast for more than five years.
He also made one of the most focused, succinct and relatable pitches for Medicare for all that I’ve heard, and he did so at a time of peak voter anxiety about health insurance. I do think his success says a lot about Democratic voters and Israel. But that’s not the whole story here.
Bret: Medicare for all would be a fiscally ruinous measure, costing roughly $30 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Add up the combined wealth of all of America’s billionaires and you don’t get close to covering that sum, which means the program would inevitably entail steep tax increases for the middle class, not to mention an end to most private medical insurance. The idea might sell well with young progressives, but it won’t sell so well with middle-income America. El-Sayed also wants to abolish ICE, rather than rein it in sharply and sensibly reform it, which is another brainstorm that sounds good to left-liberal ears but ignores the fact that Donald Trump is president this time around in large part on account of the Biden administration’s laxness on immigration enforcement.
I know the Democratic instinct is to just do the opposite of whatever MAGA believes, but a successful party also needs to learn why its opponents were able to defeat them.
Frank: That’s truer in theory than in practice. Trump and Republicans prevailed in 2024 not because they humbly heeded the lessons of their comeuppances in 2018 and 2020 but because Democrats, back in the driver’s seat, screwed up so badly — when it came to immigration, to selling the party’s economic initiatives to voters, to reassuring them that they fully recognized their financial struggles, to confronting President Biden’s decline in an honest way that didn’t leave everyone scrambling after that June 2024 debate.
Bret: True. And by governing well to the left of what Biden promised when he ran in 2020, both by who he was and how he campaigned.
Frank: Regarding Medicare for all, I agree that it’s a risky and quite possibly wrongheaded policy. But I’m not sure how many middle-income Americans are familiar enough with the details of it to reject it along the lines you lay out. I paid a lot of attention in recent weeks to what Michigan voters were telling journalists and saying in focus groups. Many, many voters act on impressions more than detailed information. And their impression was that El-Sayed was genuinely plugged in to their needs and fears. Medicare for all was as much an emblem of that as it was a discrete prescription.
Bret: I think that’s probably right. But there’s another issue with El-Sayed that, I suspect, will haunt him and other progressives, like Zohran Mamdani, whose message is that America is too often a nation of bigotry and intolerance: Their own biographies contradict that narrative. In El-Sayed’s case, he is the son of Egyptian immigrants who, after his parents’ divorce and second marriages, became the stepgrandson of white Presbyterian deacons and went on to become his class’s commencement speaker at the University of Michigan, a Rhodes scholar, a leading public health official in the state and now, in his early 40s, a potential U.S. senator. If anything affirms the bigheartedness of America, it’s him. Progressives need to say this forthrightly, rather than dilate on what a racist, inequitable country we supposedly are.
Frank: I file this under the heading of most politicians assume voters can’t hold two thoughts in their heads at once, so they can’t see an El-Sayed or a Mamdani as both an affirmation of this country’s extraordinary promise and a credible voice for the underprivileged and the marginalized. To be fair, El-Sayed and Mamdani don’t lie about or deny their biographies, and El-Sayed does at times connect himself to the American dream. But I agree that they don’t emphasize the positive takeaways from their own success as much as they should, to round out the picture of America and do full justice to the American story.
But you’ve once again tugged me and readers toward complaints about Democrats and the left. Republicans and the right have more to answer for right now, including — and here again we enter the realm of the surreal — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new cooking show.
Bret: What? As my favorite ex-tennis player liked to say: You cannot be serious.
Frank: “You cannot be serious” is the tagline, the mantra, the epigraph of the Trump era, Bret.
Bret: OK, so tell me about this cooking show. I assume the recipes include bear ragout, raccoon au poivre, skunk tartare, not to mention rattlesnake ratatouille?
Frank: Don’t forget the whale bouillabaisse
Here’s the skinny: In an administration that has erased any and all distinctions between government work, reality television and social-media marketing, our secretary of health has taken a break from vilifying vaccines to inaugurate “The Real Food Show,” on YouTube. He’ll be traveling the country to stand stiffly in kitchens with hapless chefs who make meals that conform to the newly inverted food pyramid. In the first episode, he clumsily assists in the construction of salmon cakes that don’t look remotely appetizing. Ina Garten, he’s not.
Bret: Move over, Barefoot Contessa. Hello, Brain-eaten Quack.
Frank: Or Bare-Chested Charlatan. I should note that the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has spent much of the past year shooting a YouTube series called “The Great American Road Trip,” which hasn’t been released yet but will apparently show him, his wife and their nine children visiting national parks, landmarks and tourist sites in 10 states and Washington, D.C. Nice work if you can get corporations to sponsor it (which he did). Can a YouTube fitness show starring Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth be far behind? He could emerge as a kind of Jane Fonda for the modern manosphere: Barbellarella.
Bret: We’re living in the age of Reality Substitution, brought about through the marriage of Reality TV, alternative facts and now artificial intelligence. But, Frank, let’s not end on this Decline-and-Fall note, as tempting as it is. Anything worth celebrating?
Frank: For sure. “Etna,” a new novel by Paul Yoon, was published this week, and I devoured it in two sittings. The title character is a dog trying to make his way home after being conscripted into a war and performing duties and beholding deaths that leave him physically and emotionally scarred. He narrates the book, and Yoon’s spare, precise, beautiful language lifts a conceit that could have been hokey or gimmicky into something revelatory: a glimpse of human folly and cruelty through eyes of the utmost innocence. Here’s Etna on the change he notices in a fellow war dog, Fuji:
As time went on, the more hurt she was, the more she wanted to hurt. And the blue in her eyes grew less blue, and I could never explain that.
What a succinct commentary on the cycles and the toll of violence. Although “Etna” made me cry, it also brought me joy, because it’s a gorgeous reminder of our ability to look searingly and soulfully at who we are and what we’ve become.
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