Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. So, Graham Platner — described by an ex-girlfriend as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth” — handily won his primary in Maine and will now be the Democratic candidate running against the incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins. As I see it, this is pretty much the death knell of the #MeToo movement. Am I wrong?
Frank Bruni: What’s shy of a death knell? A coma knell?
Bret: A doom chime?
Frank: I want to hedge here, because I refuse to believe we’ve abandoned all censure of men who mistreat women. But Platner’s official coronation as the Democratic nominee is certainly no cause for rejoicing. Unless you’re Senator Collins, who, I presume, is doing cartwheels.
Bret: I don’t know Maine politics well enough to say whether the fact that Platner’s two primary opponents — including Janet Mills, the incumbent governor who stopped campaigning over a month ago — collectively got a little more than a quarter of the vote means that Collins will benefit from a small but significant bloc of voters who might sit out the general election or even vote for her. But my gut tells me that a few more Platner revelations will emerge between now and November. To which I say: great. Maine Democrats (I’m looking at you, Stephen King), you may now lie in the bed you’ve made.
Frank: That’s not “great,” Bret. Your point about Democratic hypocrisy in promoting and celebrating Platner is well taken. But if control of the Senate winds up hinging on this one race and the Republicans who have bowed to President Trump retain their majority by winning it, that isn’t great. Any lesson learned about ignoring a candidate’s unfitness for office pales next to the danger our democracy will be in if Trump has a subservient Congress for his final (we hope!) two years in the presidency. And that peril has been made especially clear in his recent ranting about the primaries in California being rigged.
Bret: Trump is a danger to everyone whether he controls Congress or not. Democrats are a danger to themselves if they follow Republicans into the moral gutter, which is what the Platner candidacy represents to me. Or is it now the position of most Democrats that a man who shoves and keeps a woman in a room until she’s “calm,” as Platner allegedly did, can be forgiven so long as they agree with the candidate’s positions and the woman making the allegation belongs to the opposing political party? In that case, Elizabeth Warren and all the other progressives who opposed Brett Kavanaugh on far more tenuous allegations owe the justice a big fat apology.
Frank: First off, Trump is a bigger danger if he controls Congress.
Bret: Not at all sure about that, but go on.
Frank: Second, a free pass for assaulting women is not the position of most Democrats. What happened here is that Democrats rallied to Platner prematurely, gullibly, foolishly — they were buying into a myth more than a man — and now many of them are trying to rationalize that or pretend that he’s not who he has been revealed to be. Sounds familiar, I know. But is it your — or the Republican — position that Platner deserves as much of our disgust and worry as Trump, whose personal history is no prettier, who holds a hell of a lot more power, who seems to be unraveling before our eyes and who keeps telling us loud and clear that he won’t accept any results in November that he doesn’t like? Are we hurtling toward Jan. 6, 2021, redux? Can you and I discuss that?
Bret: Just a point of clarification: I left the Republican Party a long time ago. I voted for Hillary Clinton with surprise, Joe Biden with hope (subsequently disappointed), and Kamala Harris with the utmost reluctance — and only because she wasn’t Donald Trump. None of that makes me a Democrat, just a politically homeless, wandering conservative.
Frank: That’s why I said “your or the Republican position.” I’ve got your political biography down pat, my friend. Kamala and I thank you.
Bret: One vote. In the state of New York. Not exactly a balance-tipper.
Frank: But give yourself credit. I do. It’s vitally important that each of us shows independence of thought and not binding, blinding party loyalty in times this tribal.
I would, God help me, still vote for Platner over Collins, but that’s not Democratic tribalism. It’s not because Trump is a Republican. It’s because he’s Trump and he would absolutely usher us into authoritarianism if he could — he’s a democracy extinction-level event. And I don’t trust Collins to hold the line against him. It’s an ugly calculation reflecting and befitting an ugly age. But I won’t feign enthusiasm or respect for Platner, who has done something horribly selfish here. He stepped up to run knowing how many nasty secrets he had, knowing that they might haunt him and his party and knowing the stakes of this race. And here we are, and here I am.
Bret: Right. This is why the country is better served when a critical mass of conservatives won’t go along with the worst political impulses of the Republican Party — and a critical mass of liberals won’t go along with the worst impulses of the Democrats, either. It not only keeps our politics sane; it also makes them interesting.
But as to your question about another Jan. 6, I sort of doubt it. I think Trump is going to talk a lot of, er, stuff, but I don’t see the states or the courts or Congress doing his bidding — just as they didn’t in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. My guiding conviction is that our institutions remain much stronger than this president.
Might I be mistaken? God forbid, though it’s not as if I haven’t been spectacularly wrong before.
Frank: The courts and states not doing Trump’s bidding won’t prevent another Jan. 6 because, as you just pointed out, they denied him in 2020 and then Jan. 6 happened. Jan. 6 was, in fact, the primal scream about his failure to get satisfaction from the states and the courts.
Bret: And yet, despite the outrage and tragedy of that day, Joe Biden was duly certified as president.
Frank: Wait, wait, so Jan. 6 or something like it isn’t that big a deal if it fails? “All’s Well That Ends Well” is a lovely Shakespeare comedy (to flash back to our conversation last week). It’s not the takeaway from what happened at the Capitol that day.
Bret: That’s not at all what I’m saying. Jan. 6 was an American disgrace. But neither was it the Reichstag fire. To me, the lesson of that day wasn’t the fragility of American democracy but rather its resilience.
Frank: You’re correct that we’ve had many examples of institutions holding firm, but I’m hugely concerned about the lingering belief — the false reassurance — that Trump’s bark is worse than his bite. Look at his cabinet of unscrupulous incompetents, confirmed by spineless Senate Republicans. At the implosion of the Justice Department and the corruption of the F.B.I. At the billions of dollars that he, his family and his friends are grifting. At the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Trump has a bite, all right. I see teeth marks and torn flesh everywhere. He’s governing like Godzilla chomping down on a hapless Japanese fishing village.
Bret: Actually, I think he’s governing more like a geriatric T. rex with severe flatulence and a painful case of gout that makes it difficult for him to walk. He roars, he stinks, he flashes his big scary teeth, but, increasingly, he doesn’t hunt.
Frank: Well, the stench itself is unbearable. But let’s see about the hunting. I’d urge everyone to read the authoritative, dispassionate analysis of “his long-running project to erode public faith in elections” that our colleagues Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman wrote this week. And to revisit the last minutes of Trump’s “Meet the Press” interview with Kristen Welker, when he stormed off. It’s telling that he sat there calmly enough through her mentions of his broken promise not to start wars and of stratospheric gas prices, but when she pushed back on his bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen, that Jan. 6 rioters were set up by the F.B.I. and that Democrats are rigging this year’s contests, he freaked out. Melted down. We’re talking Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-caliber melting.
Bret: You’re pointing to the real damage caused by Trump, which isn’t that he’s going to inflict a catastrophe but rather that he’s going to corrode the invisible bonds of trust that keep a republic like ours together. Then again, it would help if we could call an election in hours, rather than wait days or potentially weeks for the ballots to be counted, like in Los Angeles. Democrats could do their own part in restoring trust in elections by ending the practice of ballot harvesting — letting third parties like labor unions collect and return ballots — and insisting that late-arriving votes won’t get counted.
Frank: We indeed need to recognize that there are current voting practices that confuse people — slow counting and delayed results are prime examples, as The Times’s editorial board just commendably recognized — and that there’s a climate of profound distrust in this country that compels us to make things simpler, clearer, faster. You and I have found a point of agreement here!
Bret: Uh-oh.
Frank: I bet we can also agree, Bret, on an inspiring recent article by another Times colleague, David Waldstein, about Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, a key part of the New York Knicks’ championship in 1973 — which was the last time the team won it all. He played through injuries and was physically ravaged by the sport. Now 81, he lives in chronic pain. But he refuses to complain about that.
Our country is all grievance all the time. And this man is all gratitude.
Bret: And speaking of gratitude, our readers shouldn’t miss Amelia Nierenberg’s and Ségolène Le Stradic’s moving and fascinating obituary in The Times for Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir “Persepolis,” who died much too soon at the age of 56. The blockbuster memoir was a chronicle of her nightmare childhood under the totalitarian religious despotism of the mullahs. What I didn’t know is that Satrapi also directed mainstream feature films, was an acclaimed painter, wrote children’s books and basically demonstrated how absolutely amazing Iran’s women are and will be, the moment they’re finally set free.
She also published, in The Times, a brilliant illustrated ode to smoking. It concludes: “I know that this thing that has given me pleasure for decades may finally kill me. I accept that.” The obituary did not provide a cause of Satrapi’s death. Whatever it was, what a life.
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