Befitting his home in the Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. practices the politics of narcissism: If I embrace it, it must be right. If I embody it, you should emulate it.
I flaunt a sun-sizzled appearance, so you should have the same leathery license.
About two months ago, the health secretary nixed a proposal by the Food and Drug Administration to make tanning beds, like alcohol and cigarettes, off-limits to minors. That development didn’t get extensive news media attention. It couldn’t compete with all the salvos being exchanged — between the United States and Iran, between President Trump and the pope — and it arguably had marginal significance: The proposal had been on the books, unimplemented, for more than a decade. Kennedy wasn’t changing a policy. He was killing a possibility.
But why this one? Why bother? Is there some melanoma lobby we don’t know about? Needn’t he conserve his energy for his shirtless workouts and his mindless conspiracy theories?
He cited the importance of personal choice and the burden that tanning regulations would place on small businesses, but I think his attention to the matter reflected a particular obsession among Trump and his attendants. They’re fixated on looks — to a degree that’s not remotely normal, in a manner that’s positively cartoonish, with no appreciation for how much of themselves and their vacuous governing philosophy they’re revealing.
Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised.
Appearances simultaneously obscure reality and substitute for it. Your sheen is your success, and you are what you impersonate. Trump has long been known to judge potential cabinet secretaries and military leaders on whether they look the part, and that thinking factored into his embrace of Kevin Warsh, who was just confirmed by the Senate to be the new chair of the Federal Reserve.
Sure, Warsh has an impressive résumé, and he has signaled obeisance to a president who demands such submission. But he has an additional asset. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’” Trump wrote in the late January social media post that announced Warsh’s selection. According to an article by Eva Roytburg in Fortune magazine at that time, Trump once told Warsh, during a 2019 meeting in the White House, “You’re a really handsome guy.”
To Trump, that’s an important credential. All the world’s a television show, “central casting” is a recurring compliment and handsomeness or beauty establishes a kind of superiority, which in turn bequeaths confidence, which then begets dominance. By his zoology, an aviary of peacocks equals a menagerie of lions.
And what peacocks these putzes are. In many other milieus, Kristi Noem’s comically voluminous tresses, suspiciously plump visage and unsubtle makeup would be a waste of aggressive cosmetology. In Trump’s circle, they established her as a fierce warrior goddess — Wonder Woman minus the golden lasso — and got her the title of homeland security secretary for 13 sadistic months.
In many other milieus, Pete Hegseth’s habit of sharing videos of his workouts would be seen as a grossly self-enamored distraction. In Trump’s circle, they’re a testament to his tenacity. The defense secretary posted one such ode to his own musculature shortly before the beginning of the war with Iran, as U.S. warships headed toward that region; it showed him doing a bench press as the soldiers whom he’d gathered around him cheered, his wife applauded and, I guess, the ayatollahs quivered. Nothing spells imminent doom like a cabinet member’s pecs.
Kennedy has painstakingly sculpted and burnished his own physique — through gym workouts, testosterone therapy, tanning. He has the same retrograde take on masculinity and male primping that Hegseth does, along with the same moth-to-flame fascination with social media, where he can be found pumping iron in jeans, ditching his shirt, soaking in a hot tub. Kid Rock joined him for cardio and calisthenics in a sauna. Hegseth joined him for — and beat him in — a race to finish 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups.
Is this supposed to pass for inspiration? It’s merely proof of perspiration. But it seems to raise rather than lower these exhibitionists’ standing with the president. Trump treats physical vanity as a secret handshake, a sign that you get his egotistic ethos and you belong. If you’re not strutting, you’re not selling.
Pitch and packaging are everything. Perfect them and you don’t have to worry about the product itself. That thinking informs the cabinet secretaries’ physical preening just as it explains the president’s oratorical preening — all those ludicrous superlatives — and his emphasis on costumes, scenery and slogans.
Remember those colorful charts in front of that gigantic American flag in the White House Rose Garden for the announcement of mathematically nonsensical tariffs that would come and go, increase and decrease, and ultimately be deemed illegal? Liberation Day was the semantic lipstick on that pig.
The war with Iran is Operation Epic Fury, and it has demonstrated anew that the Trump administration’s initiatives are lavishly marketed rather than carefully conceived. Assessments of the war’s progress change daily, even hourly, and repeatedly turn out to be unreliable, because they’re often just phrases put through the language equivalent of tanning beds to be given a glow and bronzed just so. That’s what’s important. Not the cancer growing beneath.
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For the Love of Sentences
Given the large trove of submissions since the previous newsletter two weeks ago, I’ll let this section run a bit longer than usual.
In his newsletter, Ron Charles noted that just across town from where a would-be assassin stormed the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, actors performed a classic play with obvious bearing on our nation’s turmoil: “The difference, of course, is that we know ‘Macbeth,’ for all its savagery, will finally end with the restitution of order. But America is still stuck in the third act of this tragedy, and we can’t know if the author is William Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett.” (Thanks to David P. Barash of Goleta, Calif., and Denise Showers of Janesville, Wis., for nominating this.)
On his Facebook page, Michael Jochum observed that King Charles III’s recent speech to Congress demonstrated “what language sounds like when it is treated with respect. Full sentences. Complete thoughts. A measured cadence that doesn’t lurch from grievance to grievance like a drunk driver weaving across lanes.” President Trump achieves a different effect. “Listening to him after Charles is like following a symphony with a kazoo solo.” (Lawrence Walker, Kerrville, Texas)
In The Times, Maureen Dowd flashed back to 1985, when Charles’s mother was the queen of England and he and his first wife, Diana, made an American trip: “Even without talking much, just tucking her chin in shyly and looking up out of those luminous blue eyes, Diana outshone her prince. It was pretty much a total eclipse of the son.” (Mary Paterno, Kutztown, Pa., and Susan Girod, Paris, among many others)
Also in The Times, Carlos Lozada reacted to reports that Trump finds the war with Iran boring and that his administration has wondered about the effect of simply declaring victory and moving on: “Trump promised no more forever wars; Iran could be his whatever war.” (Marla Israel, Ottawa, Ontario, and Gregory Payne, Norwalk, Conn.)
Also in The Times, Robin Givhan mulled the meaning of a couture extravaganza with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as its honorary co-chairs: “The Met Gala is the perfect laundromat for soulless tech money.” Robin also took stock of Sánchez Bezos’ “ostentatious pleasure” in her outrageously expensive wardrobe: “She counts her 10-figure blessings, and wears her windfall on her back for all to see.” (Jenny Abbe, Redding, Calif., and Steven Youra, South Pasadena, Calif., among others)
Amy X. Wang explored a new frontier in self-care: “Every day in New York City, I pass two storefronts named FaceGym and the Tox, both of which offer depuffing sessions via tools that appear designed for grooming horses or hosing down tractor-trailers. I would like to tell you that I have never paid money to either of these businesses, but unfortunately this magazine is fact-checked.” (Heide Estes, Brunswick, Maine, and Sarah Maza, Evanston, Ill.)
Mark Harris approached “John of John,” a new book by Douglas Stuart, with caution: “My alarm bells sounded at a phrase in the jacket copy: ‘As lambing season turns to shearing season…’ Oh, no, I thought. This is going to be one of those novels in which the travails of stoic, simple people of the soil are trudgingly described in prose that smells of damp wool and earnestness.” (Georgia Raysman, Manhattan, and Becky Wood, Anacortes, Wash., among others)
And Neil deGrasse Tyson imagined an alien landing in Los Angeles, assuming that “Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile” and then noticing an additional detail: “Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
In The Wall Street Journal, the automobile critic Dan Neil threw shade on the shade of a new Mercedes that retails for more than $225,000: “Our test car dazzled in the White Ambience scheme, the color of arctic foxes, papal vestments and pharmaceutical cocaine.” (Peter Cummings, Bishop, Calif.)
In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Jean Rudin, Columbus, Ohio)
In The Guardian, Ben Child reacted to a proposed movie version of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: “The 17th-century epic poem has always felt like an outlier, a work of literature too religiously inspired to be filmed purely as a work of fantasy, yet too riotously bonkers to be treated with puritanical reverence. It contains more drama than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in every line of thunderous God-baiting iambic pentameter.” (Dan Armstrong, Milwaukee)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Shannon Proudfoot mocked recent remarks in which Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, fixated on a Liberal luminary: “He mentioned Justin Trudeau seven times. Someone close to Mr. Poilievre needs to park him beneath the former prime minister’s window on a moonlit night, with a boombox blasting Sarah McLachlan’s ‘I Will Remember You,’ just to get it all out of his system.” (Doug Sweet, Montreal, and Philip Fine, Montreal)
And in her newsletter, Stacey Patton questioned the journalistic judgment behind a recent news report: “Somewhere, an editor looked at the state of the world, looked at democracy holding on by a press-on nail, looked at grocery prices, wars, climate disasters, collapsing institutions, and said, ‘Hold up. Kyle Rittenhouse got bit by a spider? Run that.’” She identified Rittenhouse, whose reaction to the bite led to his hospitalization, as “the man who fatally shot two protesters during the 2020 demonstrations in Kenosha and then became the right-wing’s favorite little armed grievance goblin.” “Once you become a mascot for white grievance,” she added, “even your swelling enters the national record.” (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Reading and Watching
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As the grateful companion of Regan, the nearly 12½-year-old pooch pictured above, I was bound to be moved by the sportswriter Joe Posnanski’s recent tribute to his poodle, Westley, who is on the cusp of 14. But I think any dog lover — scratch that, anyone with a heart — will savor his description of an animal whose energy has dimmed but whose capacity for love has not. (Thanks to Pamela Beck of Sacramento for drawing the tribute to my attention.)
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I quoted from Posnanski’s paean in my most recent Times Opinion exchange with Bret Stephens, which covered Keir Starmer’s troubles, Kash Patel’s embarrassments and more. We discussed Graham Platner the week before that, following an earlier conversation about the violence at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and King Charles III’s visit.
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I was saddened to read last week about the death of Jason Collins, who, as the first openly gay man to play in the N.B.A., was a courageous gay rights trailblazer. Back in 2013, when he publicly disclosed his sexual orientation, I wrote this column about him in The Times. I also did this video and this short interview with him.
On a Personal Note
I once dated a man who announced, over an expensive dinner out in Manhattan, that he wished there were a daily pill that met all his nutritional needs, so he could be spared the time and tedium of food selection, preparation, mastication.
I took offense. I was, at the time, this newspaper’s chief restaurant critic, so he was telling me that the way I had to spend every night was a way he didn’t care to spend any night. We were done soon after that. But he hadn’t simply provoked me. He’d revealed himself as a certain type: the grimly efficient, drearily practical, food-is-just-fuel epicurean apostate.
His type is having its day. In The Atlantic recently, Rachel Sugar wrote about the current bounty of nutrient-dense protein shakes that many people use not just as meal supplements but as meal replacements — as what she called “nonfood nutrition.” The Fairlife line of such concoctions “has become Coca-Cola’s fastest-growing U.S. brand,” she reported, adding that it competes with similar, “meticulously calibrated” drinks from “Rebbl and Orgain and Koia and Oikos, along with many, many other companies whose names have the wrong number of vowels.”
“Food is fraught and confusing,” Sugar explained, “but the shakes are reassuringly precise.” So is the metastasizing variety of protein bars, which have the same appeal. Who needs the food pyramid when you can have nonfood rectangles?
I’ve tried my share of them. During a trip to Costco the other week, I spotted a Kirkland Signature 20-pack of protein bars for only about $25 and decided it was a bargain I couldn’t pass up. It was more like a bargain I almost threw up. The Cookies and Cream bars tasted like ambiguously flavored cement. The Chocolate Peanut Butter Chunk bars were better, meaning I could choke down half of one before losing all will to live.
Is this what my long-ago dinner date yearned for? Is it what anyone really wants? Sure, food can be fraught and confusing, but our talent for turning it into an expression of creativity, a vessel of pleasure, a cause for pause and a bridge between generations is among the greatest gifts we humans possess. No shake, no bar, no pill shows proper gratitude for that.
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