Now, supposedly, Donald Trump must deliver.
The easy promises of the campaign trail yield to the arduous chore of governing, and either he comes through with lower prices, faster growth and order on the border, or he and his Republican allies confront an erosion of support and a reckoning at the polls.
I keep reading and hearing that. It’s the obvious analysis, the default prognostication, and it’s the refuge of Democrats desperate for a way back: The leader will be judged by how effectively he leads.
But that musty truism may not apply anymore, not to the extent it used to, not when truth itself is up for grabs. If ever someone were poised to govern under circumstances in which results are only marginally relevant and accountability is a quaint relic — the manual typewriter of American politics — it’s Trump.
That’s a function of both the age and the man. No president in my lifetime has been elected in such a corrupted information environment, and no president has so shamelessly participated in its corruption.
If Trump fails by established metrics, he’ll declare those metrics bogus and delegitimize the experts and agencies that calculate them. And there’ll be no shortage of partisan players in the Babel of news media and social media to support him in that scheme. We saw that when they indulged his lies after the 2020 election. They’ve grown only more submissive since.
If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes. And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.
And before our entrenchments in such cinched corridors of pseudoreality zapped our powers of discernment. “We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month. “Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.”
Elon Musk, anyone? He’s a fixture at Mar-a-Lago. That’s no accident and no small thing. Trump will bromance whom he must and do whatever’s necessary to twist the narrative in his favor. No scruple impedes him. No concern for precedent or propriety complicates his resolve.
That’s the scary moral of the past week, when he spent several minutes of his first big news conference since Nov. 5 putting journalists on notice: I will take you to court. You will cry uncle or else. He then made that clear by filing a lawsuit against the pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling firm and The Des Moines Register for producing a public opinion survey shortly before the election that augured a big victory by Kamala Harris. Flawed soothsaying is hardly libel — and so Trump’s lawyers instead claimed consumer fraud.
Trump wants the F.B.I. to be run by a provocateur, Kash Patel, who has vowed to throw mouthy journalists in jail. The peerlessly bombastic Trump booster Steve Bannon used a speech at the New York Young Republican Club gala on Sunday night to raise that same specter. According to an article by Hugo Lowell in The Guardian, Bannon said: “I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media.” He wondered if the media should be “included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.” He mentioned the MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann and the MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow by name.
This is about intimidation. It’s about creating a climate in which The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos prevented his news organization from endorsing Kamala Harris and in which, just this week, ABC News settled a defamation suit that Trump had filed against it by agreeing to pay $15 million to his future presidential foundation and museum, all because of an imprecise choice of words by George Stephanopoulos that, in the view of some legal scholars, fell far short of the “malice” necessary for ABC News to be found liable.
“Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah, said in an article in The Times by Michael M. Grynbaum and Alan Feuer. Ever the predator, Trump smells that fear. And he’s pouncing.
We in the news media could and should be more careful in some of our reporting, less blinkered in many of our assessments. But Trump isn’t trying to make us better or get a fair shake. He wants plaudits only and he wants us on our knees, our ability to criticize him inferior to his ability to deify himself, our lances too blunt to pierce the cocoon of flattery in which he has tucked himself.
The next best thing to results is illusions. And a record of accomplishments isn’t necessary in a hall of mirrors, not if it’s big and blinding enough.
For the Love of Sentences
In The New Yorker, David Remnick recalled Trump’s early manipulation of the media: “In the 1980s, as a real-estate hustler, he repeatedly called in to the tabloids about his exploits, real or imagined. He was the Donny Appleseed of The New York Post, tirelessly planting items in the soil of Page Six.” (Thanks to Robin Allen of San Francisco and Ellen Stross of Ann Arbor, Mich., for nominating this.)
Also in The New Yorker, Helen Rosner found panettones worth eating, including one “with bits of dried fruits and nuts suspended in the matrix of dough like dewdrops on a spider’s web.” (Marianne Johnston, Philadelphia)
In a daily newsletter published by The Minnesota Reformer, J. Patrick Coolican marveled at the partisan acrimony in his state’s legislature: “You know it’s bad when a handful of Senate Dems offer an olive branch to Republicans by forming a ‘Blue Dog Caucus,’ and the Republican response is to eat the olives and throw the branch back in their faces.” (Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis)
In her newsletter, Fresh Hell, Tina Brown surveyed casting upgrades in Trump’s political circle: “Even Don Jr. has revamped his image, switching out his former arm candy — screeching, duvet-lipped Kimberly Guilfoyle, whom Trump obligingly shot out of a cannon toward the U.S. embassy in Athens — for a svelte, blonde Palm Beach socialite.” (Lynn Walterick, Exeter, N.H.)
In The Times, Michelle Cottle pondered the reasons for a scion’s riches: “If you believe Jared Kushner’s private equity firm would have been given all that overseas investment money to play with absent his daddy-in-law’s political juice, I have a gold-plated Trump Bible to sell you, once owned by Jesus himself.” (Ron Sirota, River Forest, Ill., and Robin Allen, San Francisco, among others)
In her newsletter, The Pleasure Principle, Catherine Hiller explained the sequence of drafting and then editing a composition: “I write to get the beast out; I revise by trimming its nails and combing its hair.” (Alexander Warnow, Nevada City, Calif.)
In The Daily Upside, Isobel Asher Hamilton connected the legal battles of Rupert Murdoch’s heirs to an acclaimed HBO series: “According to court documents, the children’s concerns about what will happen to Murdoch’s media empire after he dies were directly prompted by an episode of ‘Succession.’ Life imitating art is one thing, but this is more like life copying art’s homework.” (Doc DeLaughter, St. Augustine, Fla.)
In The Wall Street Journal, John Anderson detected false notes aplenty in how Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas in “Maria,” “leading with her chin as if it were the prow of a ship aimed at Aristotle Onassis’s Adam’s apple” and “turning her into Blanche DuBois with a big bank account.” (Betsy Snider, Acworth, N.H.)
On Yahoo.com, Fraser Lewry winced at Bob Dylan’s voice during some performances over recent years: “He occasionally sounds like an elderly cat struggling to evacuate a particularly stubborn hairball.” (Todd Phillips, Concord., N.C.)
And in a column in The Washington Post on Britain’s “merry, miserable Christmas trees,” Mark Lasswell contrasted the grand specimen in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to its emaciated counterpart in Trafalgar Square in London: “They look like a before-and-after ad for arboreal Ozempic.” (Meg Solera, Durham, N.C., and Stephanie Zarpas, Annapolis, Md.)
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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Cathal Kelly is a columnist for The Globe and Mail of Toronto whose work has repeatedly been cited in For the Love of Sentences. But a recent article of his on Bill Belichick’s hiring as the head football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (my alma mater!) warrants attention independent of that section, not just because it’s a smorgasbord of memorable sentences but also because of its broadly relevant and resonant wisdom. I can’t know whether Kelly has Belichick’s psyche right, but Kelly is indisputably correct in his observations that being at the top of your field doesn’t equal being on top of the world and that you need to let go — of some ambition, of much anger — to scale contentment.
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As for those sentences, here’s Kelly on Belichick’s New England Patriots days: “He’d had a job he was good at, until he wasn’t. He clung to it like Kate Winslet on a floating door. Eventually, the Patriots tricked him into the parking lot and locked the doors behind him.” On Belichick’s new gig: “The U.N.C. job is a ridiculous one, in the same way that all U.S. college coaching jobs are ridiculous. You’re running a steroidal peewee program, but treated like you are a Joint Chief of Staff.” “He showed up at U.N.C. this week looking as if he’d had corrective maxillofacial surgery that allowed him to smile,” Kelly wrote. “So here he is now, diminished and enlarged at the same time.” (Thanks to Risa Levine of Vancouver, British Columbia, for flagging Kelly’s article.)
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When it comes to carbs, Italian food lovers fall into three categories: the players who will readily stray from bucatini for a dinnertime dalliance with gnocchi, the cads who will repeatedly cheat on rigatoni with a comely risotto and the pasta monogamists like me. That said, Anthony Lane’s recent paean to risotto in The New Yorker put lust in my heart and made me question my marriage.
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“The Agency,” a Paramount+ With Showtime series about international espionage that’s based on a French production, “The Bureau,” is trying my patience with its erratic pacing and habit of abandoning subplots for entire episodes. Despite the presence of such magnetic actors as Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright, I’m not sure I’ll stick with it. And despite Hugh Grant’s delectable performance in “Heretic,” a widely praised 2024 movie now streaming for a rental fee on Apple TV+, I wish I’d skipped it. It strains a viewer’s patience during the first half, then devolves into stock horror-movie silliness.
On a Personal Note
I was told I’d be wiser. I heard that all the time. When I grew older, I’d more accurately judge people and more quickly size up situations. That’s what adults in their 40s said when I was in my teens and what retirees said when I was midcareer. And they were mostly right.
I was told I’d know myself better, and indeed I do, but that seems to me an unimpressive function of simple arithmetic: I’ve had more years with the person in question and collected more evidence of his triggers and tics. He was a haiku to me at 13, a short story at 24, a novella at 35. He’s “Middlemarch” now. I guess he’ll be an encyclopedia in the end. I hope it’s the kind with illustrations and artful fonts.
I turned 60 this year — on Halloween, to be exact. That was hardly the main thing about my 2024 but it was a thing, milestone-wise. Days later I went to the movies at a multiplex where, I discovered, I qualified for the senior-citizen discount. I’ll consider that a silver lining to go with my increasingly silver hair.
But while I’ve matured in many ways, I feel less different than I thought I would, and I don’t mean physically. (On that front, the passage of time is palpable.) I mean emotionally.
Whatever wisdom and self-knowledge I’ve gained pale beside the lingering gremlins in my head and stubborn butterflies in my gut. I’m still needled by so many doubts, roiled by so many fears. At some point, I thought, I’d get a break.
There are moments when I’m 60 going on 16, and none of my elders ever told me about that. They never explained that a certain inextinguishable tremulousness isn’t an affliction of youth but an affliction of being alive, and that “forever young” is at once an aspiration and a curse. If turning 60 taught me anything, it’s that the magnitude of clarity and degree of confidence that I’ve long craved aren’t the rewards of aging, waiting for me if I just hung on. They’re pretty myths.
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