Bret Stephens: Graham Platner, Frank. Really?
Frank Bruni: I see you’ve taken the bait.
Bret: In all the years that I’ve been your admiring (if not always agreeing) reader, I’ve never disagreed more with one of your columns. Democrats should not be in the business of creating monsters for the sake of slaying monsters. And Platner — the Nazi-themed-tattoo-wearing and Israel-despising presumptive Democratic nominee in the race for the Maine Senate seat held by the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins — represents everything the Democrats should not be.
Frank: As I wrote in that column, Platner gives me great, great pause. I wish he weren’t the presumptive nominee, for a range of reasons that include but aren’t limited to alarming statements and behavior in his past. But an election is a binary, and, yes, Bret, I would choose him over Collins, who voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Russell Vought and whose vaunted moderation doesn’t match her fear of President Trump’s supporters.
You think that the guardrails are mostly containing Trump, and I think that he’s showing us how fragile they are and what peril we’re in. To believe as I do is to root for the candidate less likely to rubber-stamp his agenda. It’s that simple.
Bret: Collins was also one of the few Republican senators who broke with her caucus and voted to convict Trump after Jan. 6, who wouldn’t bend to some of his spending priorities, and who praised the Supreme Court for voting to strike down his unconstitutional tariffs. For that, she’s repeatedly earned Trump’s wrath, which is more than can be said for most other Republicans.
A vote for Platner, in other words, is more than just a vote for a Democratic mirror image of Trump, replete with rank bigotry and phony populism. It’s also a vote against any moderation or independence on either side of the political aisle — which is, ironically, just the way Trump wants our politics to be. Because, when all political choices are strictly binary between MAGA die-hards and progressive die-hards, MAGA will win most of those races.
Frank: In these midterms, Bret, I don’t think we have the luxury of such big-picture, long-term philosophizing. Democratically speaking, it’s do-or-die time, and it’s essential that Trump not have a Congress under Republican control for the final two years of his current term. Sure, Democrats are favored as of now to win the House, but they might not: Look at all the gerrymandering still going on. So they must do everything possible to win the Senate. The Republican Party — to which Collins belongs, no matter her discrete and admirable rebellions — has shown that it cannot be trusted to stand up to Trump. So my relentlessly practical, far-from-jubilant take is that Platner is the better choice.
And, come on, Bret: “Monster”? “Mirror image” of Trump? Isn’t that going just a bit far?
Bret: Let’s conduct a thought experiment and imagine that a Republican Senate candidate had a Nazi-themed tattoo but claimed — as Platner does — that he was unaware of its significance and had gotten it one drunken evening when he was in his 20s. Would Democrats now be giving him a pass? As for his politics, I find progressive populism just as revolting as right-wing populism. But leaving all that aside, I think Platner’s nomination, to quote the old phrase, is “worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.”
Frank: When I say I’d vote for him, Bret, that’s not “giving him a pass.” That phrase — that concept — doesn’t really apply. This is an ugly era of ugly choices. I’m saying that I’m less scared of Platner than of a Congress under Trump’s thumb. That’s really all I’m saying. But if we’re going to talk passes, it’s Trump I refuse to give one.
Bret: I don’t see how voting for someone is somehow not giving him a pass. It reminds me of all of those supposedly normal Republicans who voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton and then bloviated that they had done so “holding their noses.”
Frank: Well, this bloviator will choose not to take offense and will pivot toward an opportunity for harmony. Have you followed these interviews that former Representative Barney Frank is giving from hospice care in, well, Maine? He’s scolding Democrats there for lifting Platner above Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, who dropped out of the Senate primary last week. And he’s sternly warning Democrats — Barney Frank, a gay-rights trailblazer who’s no one’s idea of a squishy centrist — about moving too far to the left. It’s the right alarm to sound. And I can simultaneously believe that and endorse Platner over Collins. Because politics — and life — are messy that way.
Bret: God bless Barney Frank, who was in politics long enough to understand that what Americans want from the Democratic Party is a judicious liberalism that stands for freedom and fairness, not a progressivism that stands for cultural extremism and class warfare. Barney also understands that the president is a waning force in American politics: Come 2028, Democrats won’t have Trump to run against, while Republicans will be eager to run against a Democratic Party of people like Platner who may appeal to the base but will scare away swing voters. That’s why I think Platner’s nomination is such a mistake, as would be, say, the nomination of Abdul El-Sayed to run against the Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race.
Frank: Since we’re more or less speaking of the end of the world as we know it (apologies to R.E.M.), I feel I should bring up the Met Gala. I’m sure you attended and am dying to know what you wore.
Bret: You didn’t see me on the red carpet, Frank? I was in … hang on, let me check the tag … Banana Republic.
Frank: Me, I peacocked down that rouge rug in the Costco sweats that I wear when I eat my Costco rotisserie chicken.
I bring up this sacred, profane event, Bret, because I know how you like to skewer liberals and it’s essentially liberals on a skewer. How do those celebrities and other public figures prattle on about social justice and wring their lavishly moisturized hands over economic inequality and then, when the Met Gala comes calling, swarm to it like ants to a fallen croissant?
Bret: As our readers know, Frank, I’m typically on the side of the millionaires and billionaires. Except for occasions like the Met Gala, when I suddenly become the love child of Bernie Sanders and Madame Defarge.
Speaking of which, Frank, a measure in California to impose a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaire state residents has just garnered enough signatures to get on the ballot in November. Pro or con?
Frank: Ambidextrous. On the left hand, a billionaire who finds that tax offensive and onerous has traveled farther from reality than Artemis II did from Earth. On the right hand, many billionaires got that way by loving nothing more than their money, and their desire to hold on to it might prompt them to flee California and thus eliminate the financial windfall the state sought. It’s possible, no, that this measure turns out to be more symbolic than substantial?
Bret: So Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, have already left California for lower-tax states, following the lead of Elon Musk. Even Steven Spielberg has relocated. Coincidence? Nah. I think progressives should spend a couple of minutes reacquainting themselves with the fable about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or at least mastering the notion that capital is mobile.
Frank: You and I have this way of slouching toward unplanned motifs. Peacock, chicken, goose. We’re in fowl moods. Or at least avian ones.
Bret: In the words of William Butler Yeats, “And what rough chicken, its hour come round at last, slouches towards the peacock to be goosed?”
Frank: I have to ask you, Bret: Now that we’re more than two months into Trump’s “short-term excursion,” now that gas is so expensive that I recently detoured to the aforementioned Costco to fill my tank despite the long lines there, now that the president and his minions no longer speak with their usual demented brio about the imminence of unfettered victory, are you maybe just a little less bullish — I should say hawkish, given my bird brain — on this Iran war?
Bret: The price of gas was also high in May 2022 and March 2011, which is to say that it isn’t good but it isn’t exactly a crisis, either. As for the war, Trump’s main mistake was to go for a cease-fire and negotiations instead of removing or destroying Iran’s remaining nuclear materials and reopening the Strait of Hormuz by force. But our blockade of Iran’s oil exports is hurting the Tehran regime a lot, and I think the final verdict on this war is far from clear.
If this ends with the Iranian regime being defanged, at least of its nuclear ambitions, I still say it will have been well worth the somewhat higher price of gas, or even the slightly longer wait at Costco.
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