Frank Bruni: By the time you and I convene again next week, Bret, we’ll have midterm results — most of them, anyway. I don’t think either of us wants to make precise predictions; we’re too conscious of our faulty soothsaying in the past.
Bret Stephens: I’m the guy who, after the 2022 midterms, wrote the column, “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished.” Never gonna live that one down.
Frank: Even so, I’d love your take on the dynamics that will determine what happens on Tuesday. Are there factors that are overrated and others that are overlooked? And how much, if at all, will President Trump’s continued psychic unraveling matter? He’s fuming at Norway. He’s furious at Barack Obama. To put it in terms of a restaurant getting a thorough metaphoric workout these days, his litany of gripes and grudges is longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu.
Bret: At least the items on the Cheesecake Factory’s menu aren’t served with a snarl or tipped into your lap, don’t have a rancid taste and won’t leave you with your stomach turning.
Frank: Trump has been a source of political indigestion for a long time. So what are the key differences between now and two years ago? Between now and 2016? If he’s about to get at least some magnitude of comeuppance, what reasons are drawing too little notice?
Bret: A few factors, in no particular order. Joe Biden isn’t there to be kicked around anymore. Immigration stopped being an issue that hurt Democrats and became one that hurts Republicans. The culture wars that animated the 2024 race, particularly around gender, have faded. And Trump owns the problems he claimed he was going to solve, above all the high cost of living.
There are also some similarities with 2022, when Trump endorsed a series of horrible/no good/embarrassing candidates in races that ought to have been winnable for Republicans. Remember Blake Masters in Arizona or Herschel Walker in Georgia? If Republicans wind up losing the Senate, it will be because of Trump-endorsed disasters like Ken Paxton in Texas or Mike Collins in Georgia. The quality of the candidates still matters.
Frank: It does, and each midterm contest will be determined in some measure by the comparable appeal of the two candidates squaring off. But no matter what they say or how creatively some of them try to distance themselves from the president, every Republican is also running as a Trump surrogate and every Democrat as a bulwark against a Republican Congress indulging Trump’s whims.
Bret: A candidate like Paxton isn’t just a Trump surrogate. He’s a Trump stunt double.
Frank: Indeed, and Paxton and the rest are struggling in part because Trump has been revealed to many of the voters who once supported him as a liar in the biggest, most consequential way. Yes, I know, he has been lying — about his wealth, his crowds, his tresses, his trespasses — almost as long as he has been breathing, and we in the media have done our best to catalog each and every whopper. But his supporters experienced a lot of that hooey as harmless showmanship — Trump was owning the libs or just hamming it up — and felt that he was truthful in his commitment to a few specific goals and principles, especially a better economy for struggling Americans and an end to costly, needless foreign wars.
With his tariffs and tantrums, he has aggravated inflation. With his corruption, he has shown precisely whose side he’s on: his own. And we’re now more than eight months — eight months! — into a war with Iran that has mostly humiliated America. Trump has broken fundamental promises, bedrock pacts. To me, that’s the story of the midterms.
Bret: The economy isn’t the catastrophe Democrats make it out to be. Growth is decent, consumer spending is strong, the stock market is doing well. The problem is that none of this matters if you’re not in the market and you’re paying $100 to fill up on gas. Or if you’re looking at a mortgage rate north of 7 percent.
Your larger point, though, is absolutely right. Millions of Trump voters were willing to forgive his congenital lying and shabby character because they believed he shared their one central conviction: namely, that a rigged system, organized by a corrupt and self-dealing elite speaking in its peculiar argot of preferred pronouns and other politically correct vocabulary, was getting between hard-working Americans and their achievement of the American dream. Trump’s second term is demonstrating, as nothing else has, that corruption and self-dealing are at the core of the Trump brand.
Frank: We are in violent agreement here, though I’d emphasize even more strongly your point about the distance between those who are benefiting from the current economy and those who aren’t. And that’s in part because less fortunate Americans have seldom if ever lived in a culture that reminds them so frequently where on the economic ladder they stand. I’ve written repeatedly about this relentless tiering and these microclimates of privilege, but the situation keeps getting worse. Buying a plane ticket these days is comical in its complexity, and every perk you do or don’t purchase announces to everyone around you your financial and social status. That’s a potent engine for resentment.
Bret: Hasn’t it always been thus? Little emblems of status and superiority for people to tell themselves they are at least part of the have-somethings? I used to live in a comfortable New York City neighborhood just across the street from a neighborhood that, just to go by real estate prices, was an order of magnitude richer. The differences were subtle but telling: For instance, my neighbors typically had age-appropriate spouses, whereas couples in the adjacent neighborhood were more often a generation apart.
Frank: So wealth was measured by a chauvinistic C.E.O.’s ability to pay alimony to the starter wife while lavishing jewels on her younger replacement? Lovely.
Bret: I make no judgments. That said, I think there is a deeper class divide — and a more legitimate resentment — in America. It’s between the real economy and the abracadabra economy. The abracadabra economy is wealth extracted from ether: cryptocurrency, for instance, but also a lot of modern finance and tech. It’s wealth coming from political connections, whether that’s in the form of the curiously high prices for Hunter Biden’s art or the transparently transactional “Melania” movie released by Amazon that netted a fortune for the first lady. It’s ludicrous wealth in the hands of ludicrous people.
There’s a big difference between this kind of wealth and the kind whose origin and value is easy to ascertain: Microsoft’s software, for instance, or SpaceX’s rockets. This is why, despite all my personal and political objections to him, I can at least understand Elon Musk as a guy who earned his riches.
Frank: Earned riches that immense? I disagree, in that there’s a way in which capital begets more capital begets more capital until the sums are utterly divorced from the substance. That’s its own abracadabra.
But your point about — and your phrasing of — “wealth extracted from ether” is brilliant and important. As is your justly bipartisan invocation of Hunter Biden and Melania Trump. Americans who can’t essentially plunder some relative’s holiday card list for seed money and job interviews look at un-smooth operators like those two and understand correctly that there’s no meritocracy. Just more aggressive and less aggressive masters of grift and graft.
Bret: That’s where the populist energies of both the left and the right come from. It’s a just, legitimate criticism of where America has gone wrong. Potentially, it creates space for a kind of centrist populism that has the courage to call out unfairness wherever it finds it. Trump’s plutocratic grift is one form of it, but so was the incessant racial gerrymandering of every campus and faculty lounge and book-prize list. Corporate welfare is often another form, but so were the vast social-service scams that flourished in Minnesota. The fact that capital gains are generally taxed at a much lower rate than income has also transformed the distribution of wealth in an unhealthy way. There’s something wrong with a country in which unemployed stock investors can make more money than emergency-room doctors.
Frank: I take your point about D.E.I. initiatives, which are what you’re referring to when you mention faculty members and campuses. (He says as a faculty member on an especially hallowed campus.) Those initiatives often went so far — and were so tyrannical — that they came to seem like scams in their own right.
But there’s a crucial difference between that and Trump’s grift; the two phenomena sit uneasily in the same sentence. D.E.I. arose from inequities created by centuries of discrimination. It was to some degree a measure of redress, and at its best, it successfully advanced people and ideas that deserved more exposure. What is Trump redressing when he leverages the presidency into extra billions of personal wealth? One thing is not like the other.
Bret: I’m not saying they are the same, only that what a broad majority of Americans yearn for is a system that refuses to institutionalize any form of unfairness except as a result of merit, fairly demonstrated.
Frank: But can we ever prove merit? Isn’t it subjective?
Bret: Robert Gasser has a faster fastball than I do. An objective fact.
Frank: And you have a more erudite grasp of history than I do. Also an objective fact. But we attempt to measure and grade many other attributes and endeavors that are open to interpretation. We render verdicts colored by personal taste. And therein lies perpetual trouble and discord.
Bret: Obviously there’s always room for subjectivity: Is Mark Knopfler a better guitarist than Eric Clapton? Is the White Album the Beatles’ best album? But there’s plenty in life that can be measured with an adequate degree of objectivity — whether it’s aptitude for math and science or a gift for music and dance — and we used to have many more institutions that existed to do that measuring honestly and transparently, without regard to extrinsic characteristics. We need those institutions back if we really want to create a society broadly regarded as fair.
Frank: But we need at the same time to recognize that some objectively measured achievement is made possible by extraordinary, unearned advantage and that some people have little chance of such achievement because of the circumstances into which they were born. While a healthy society shouldn’t punish the advantaged or tell them to feel guilty — that’s where progressives so frequently go wrong — it must recognize that fairness includes trying mightily to put as many of its members as possible in a position to achieve. Sometimes that means some extra help for some people for some period of time.
Bret: That’s why I love my friend Cass Sunstein’s idea of the “nudge.” Affirmative action was fine by me when its spirit was to nudge us toward outcomes that took account of the totality of circumstances. It morphed into something else when identity became chiefly determinative of outcome and merit was treated as something akin to racism.
That’s for a longer discussion. In the meantime, Frank, can I close by pointing out the best headline in The Times for the month, if not the year?
Frank: You’ve piqued my curiosity.
Bret: It’s one for the ages: “Australian Murderer Has No Right to Vegemite, Court Says.”
I don’t know why I find it so funny, Frank. I just do. Maybe it’s because you’d probably have to be a murderer to want to eat Vegemite in the first place.
Frank: Vegemite may be the only food not on the Cheesecake Factory menu.
Bret: They should start serving it at Mar-a-Lago.
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