Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. I hope you didn’t miss Miriam Jordan’s extraordinary report in The Times about Brent Jindra, an American tech salesman and three-time Trump voter, and his wife, Galina Bobreneva, a Russian national waiting on her green card after she had sought asylum in the United States. An ICE agent stopped them at an airport, accused Bobreneva of overstaying her visa, and sent her to a detention facility that sounded like it was nearly worthy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”: “Potable water was scarce” and “ailing people were denied care until they required hospitalization.”
Sadly, I’m not at all surprised by the ICE horror. But what really gives the story its interest is the description of Jindra, a MAGA voter who now acknowledges that “we are living in fear in my own country.” Something tells me he’s not alone, and that a lot of Trump’s base may at last be turning on him. Am I daring to hope too much?
Frank Bruni: “A lot of” Trump’s base may be overly wishful. A small but highly significant fraction is not. I sense that there are Jindra-like epiphanies wide and far — many of them related to ICE, many to the disaster in Iran, many to the scale of Trump’s corruption, many to all the broken economic promises that Steven Rattner laid out so well in Times Opinion this week.
Bret: The most eye-catching number in which, to me at least, is this year’s projected $2 trillion-plus federal budget deficit, a fourfold increase from a decade ago. No wonder bond yields are surging.
Frank: It’s shocking. But I also worry about something else I see: a glee and even chortling among some longtime Trump critics, including many Democrats, who cheer the comeuppance that Trump voters like Jindra are getting. That is not the way for this country to move past Trump, and moving past Trump is everything, as his increasingly erratic, infantile and self-destructive behavior makes even clearer than before (and it was already blindingly, guttingly clear).
Bret: I’ve always liked the old proverb that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. I’m just not convinced Democrats can be the honey if they continue to veer sharply leftward, as they just did in Florida by nominating another democratic socialist, Angie Nixon, (no relation to Richard!) as their candidate in the U.S. Senate race. That trend has been holding up even if the party was spared a potential fiasco when the democratic socialist candidate, Francesca Hong, came up short in Wisconsin’s Democratic governor’s race.
Frank: Dismissing Hong’s defeat with that “even if” isn’t fair. It really did demonstrate that in the Democratic Party right now, there’s no simple and straightforward narrative of a leftward lurch. The results in Florida actually speak to that: While Nixon was soundly defeating a more moderate opponent in her Democratic primary, Representative Jared Moskowitz, running for re-election to the House, was soundly defeating a more progressive opponent in his. Without any doubt, there’s a potent affinity — at least among the especially ardent voters most likely to participate in Democratic primaries — for impassioned lefties. But it’s circumstantial and situational. The party has enormous ideological diversity — the kind that once existed, before the obey-me-or-else sledgehammer of Trump, among Republicans. The challenge is not having these factions come to blows.
Bret: OK, that’s … partly fair.
Frank: And if we’re going to mention Hong, let’s also mention Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor in Iowa, who’s a transcendently reasonable moderate. When he was the state auditor, I interviewed him a bunch of times, including for this column, in which his discussion of trans rights is hugely instructive. I kept calling him because he was so levelheaded and such an unpretentious, unfashionable breath of fresh air. Let’s mention the actual Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, whose politics, including his new wariness of data centers, reflect an ear turned more to practical problems and sensible solutions than to partisan fealty or any faddish policy prescriptions.
Bret: Sand hunts with a bow, attends church with his wife, opposes tariffs, and doesn’t think trans women should play in women’s sports: In the alternative universe in which Mitt Romney got elected president and Donald Trump had never left reality TV, he might have been a normie Republican.
Frank: So call him a normie Democrat, then! My point is that such a breed exists!
Bret: A dying breed, I sometimes fear, much as I’d like to believe you. First, I think the center of the party is well to the left of where it was under Obama, to say nothing of Clinton. I mean, I’m glad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has now admitted that “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” but I don’t really see her distancing herself from Woke 2.0, whether the subject is economic populism or a boycott of Israel. Second, and despite honorable exceptions like Josh Shapiro, I think party moderates live in fear of the left, in part because the left is much more effective at organizing and mobilizing, with their door-knocking cadres and their ability to turn out younger voters. And third, finally, because Trump is so polarizing that a lot of voters, especially at the primary level, tend to support the most anti-Trump figure they can latch on to, like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
Problem is, those candidates will tend to be much more vulnerable come November.
Frank: You are right, Bret, that the center has not held (hat tip Yeats). You are right, too, that too many center-left Democrats quiver at the ire and fire of the party’s most ardent progressives. But even in better times, politics is the business of messy, ugly choices, and I submit to you that wherever the average Democratic voter or candidate exists now is less frightening — and less threatening to democracy — than where Trump has yanked the Republican Party. And that’s the problem I have with what is otherwise warranted and even virtuous Democrat bashing. On the cusp of the midterms, it requires context. And the context is if I’m choosing between the army of A.O.C. and the tribe of Trump — if this is the binary before me — I’m marching behind her.
Bret: Well, I’m not marching behind Trump — and, as I confessed a few weeks ago, I’d sooner vote for her than for JD Vance in a presidential election. I just pray that isn’t the choice.
Frank: I’ll dust off the rosary beads to join in that prayer.
Bret: And I’ll pull out the tzitzit and tefillin. But, getting back to Trump, I do think we are seeing levels of nuttiness that probably surprise even his most constant critics. I mean, he’s now taking sides with North Korea over South? Or threatening to go to war with … Oman? As a country, we’ve somehow moved from “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” to “If It’s Trump, This Must be Bonkers.”
Frank: I am with you there, my friend. The other day I was thinking: Remember how, in late 2018, not even halfway through Trump’s first term, there were all those whispers and all that commentary about how senior officials in his administration possibly contemplated or even actively discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, by which the vice president, acting with a majority of the cabinet, can move to replace the president? They were supposedly heartsick about and panicked by the incompetence and capriciousness he was demonstrating then. Well, that Trump was like a stately, steady lion next to the mangy, rabid alley cat skittering between the Oval Office and various golf courses now. I’d give just about anything to have him back.
Bret: I’m not the first to observe that the major difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 is that in the first term, Trump’s advisers — people like Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Nikki Haley and even Bill Barr — tended to serve as containers for Trump’s craziness. Now his advisers mostly serve as amplifiers.
Frank: Trump made sure of that, Bret. He performed M.R.I.s on all prospective second-term aides and eliminated anyone in whom a spine was detected.
Bret: Still, the question I have is whether, in some flickering corner of Trump’s mind, he knows his presidency is going off the rails. He did it with the execrable Kristi Noem already, along with hapless Pam Bondi, so there’s some precedent for at least marginal improvement. For instance, he might help himself by using the disgraceful travails of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to fire Pete Hegseth and appoint a steadier hand at the Pentagon. I’d suggest retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, whom Trump would recognize from Fox News but who’d also be reassuring to the rank-and-file, while being cleareyed about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin.
Frank: Hegseth is an abysmal defense secretary and contemptible human being, but he excels at one thing, besides push-ups and pomade: remembering to flatter Trump and doing so operatically and incessantly. Ditto Kash Patel. Ditto their fellow lickspittles. That keeps them in business, and they know that it keeps them in business, and so they keep at it. Beyond which, Trump — and I know this is going to astound and rattle you, Bret — has trouble admitting fault. Firing even a small fraction of the people who need firing is more crow than he can stomach.
Bret: Nearly five years ago, I wrote a column that began, “This Sept. 11, a diminished president will preside over a diminished nation.” It was about Joe Biden. I could write the same column today, except I’d sub in the word “demented.”
Frank: For just the president or for the nation, too?
Bret: Good question. Ultimately, our leadership is a reflection of collective national self: of a culture that long ago abandoned the virtue of restraint; of technologies that, as they become more sophisticated, serve to make us more ignorant; of a society that mistakes bigness for beauty; of an approach to life in which happiness has become synonymous with the word more; of a politics that is meant to be indistinguishable from entertainment. Sometimes I think that the Trump presidency is like one of those three-sided mirrors that just confronts you with the blunt, unpleasant truth of what you really look like.
Frank: Maybe Ozempic can cure that, too? Or maybe we all simply need a vacation. You just took one, if memory serves me, to the region of my Italian ancestors, Puglia, didn’t you? Leave us with one thought you had, one meal you ate, one scene you observed that took you far, far away from the reflection in that three-sided mirror.
Bret: First of all, Frank, the tomatoes: Oh my sweet Lord. And the stracciatella: the cheese as well as the gelato. And the drive through the hill country around Alberobello, where the fields seem as if they had been painted by Jean-Francois Millet and the houses look as if they had been drawn by Dr. Seuss. And the lady at the airport car rental agency, who must have served as the model for one of the comedian Laura Ramoso’s famous skits about Italian “service” culture. And the evening view of the Adriatic from the bridge at Polignano a Mare. And, well, you know what I’m talking about.
For all its troubles, Italy is still suspended between charming absurdity and unfading glory.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Scales Can’t Fall From Our Eyes Fast Enough appeared first on New York Times.
