For President Trump and many of his closest aides and allies, every day is a great day to beat up on Joe Biden. They treat bashing the previous occupant of the White House as proper political hygiene, best repeated and ritualized, the autocrat’s equivalent of flossing your teeth.
Even so, Trump outdid himself last weekend. Apparently unsated by his ludicrous insistence that Biden saddled him with a broken economy, bored with histrionic rants about “the Biden crime family” and convinced that “worst president in American history” doesn’t do justice to Biden’s wretchedness, Trump identified Biden’s frequent use of an automated writing instrument as some kind of smoking gun — or at least smoldering pen.
It proved Biden’s utter incapacitation. It revealed him as a puppet of unelected operatives. It was manipulation, deception and corruption all in a swirl of letters and a stream of ink.
Thank heavens for Trump. He’s difficult but not drooling.
That’s the message. The ploy. Trump attends to nothing more energetically than creating comparisons, excuses and distractions that prevent voters who aren’t already done with him from straying.
The worse he makes Biden and Democrats look, the brighter he shines. So what if they’re out of power and the election was more than four months ago? They’re still useful scapegoats and flattering yardsticks. Best to keep them around.
Many wise economists, astute political analysts and all-around sages say that Trump’s policies and his tantrums (there’s enormous Venn-diagram overlap of the two) point toward failure. But what if failure doesn’t matter anymore? What if it can be cloaked, reclassified, contested, inverted?
Trump is hardly the first political leader invested in those questions, but he’s more relentless and shameless than most in pursuing answers to his liking. While his health and human services secretary may be kooky about vaccines, Trump doggedly seeks inoculation from his own incompetence.
His legally questionable ejection of all those inspectors general speaks to that. His ceaseless attempts to sideline and intimidate news organizations — through denied access, frivolous lawsuits and rococo aspersions — are about subtracting a whole source of criticism from the equation. His attacks on scientists, researchers and higher education serve his culture war and his revenge tour, but they also aim to delegitimize the experts and the data that could refute his proclamations of success.
Overarching and connecting DOGE and Project 2025 is a grander, more diffuse mission: to make the post-truth era the post-accountability age. (I’ve sounded an alarm about that danger before.) Biden as boogeyman plays a pivotal part in that scheme.
Trump’s fixation on him is so familiar by this point that it’s easy to forget how weird it is. Other presidents — as a matter of etiquette or of pride or of not seeming too desperate to shift blame — kept something of a check on their public denunciations of predecessors.
Not Trump. Ever infantile, he must always measure himself against others. Ever insecure, he must always be best, biggest, most. If the White House issued a Hot Presidents Calendar — which would be less odd (and significantly more benign) than much of Trump’s behavior since his inauguration — Trump would be 11 of the 12 months of the year. He’d maybe allow John F. Kennedy to take February, which has too few days to be worthy of Trump.
Trump was maybe a minute into his remarks to Congress two weeks ago when the crowing commenced. “We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years,” he boasted. Then: “The presidential election of Nov. 5 was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades.”
But he was just warming up for a more extravagant claim minutes later — that it had “been stated by many” that his presidency’s first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation.”
“Do you know who No. 2 is?” he added, as if citing some official ranking. “George Washington. How about that?”
Such effluvium is mostly about Trump making Trump feel good. But the invocations of Biden have a much greater degree of strategy. There were more than a dozen in his speech to Congress, so that Biden became a refrain and Trump’s acolytes in the audience learned to sing along.
Misleadingly ridiculing the government’s Social Security rolls, Trump said, “One person is listed at 360 years of age.”
“Biden!” shouted an audience member. The Republicans laughed and laughed.
The particular angles of Trump’s attacks on Biden are no accident, either. Trump was indicted in four criminal cases, so he calls Biden not just a crank but a crook. Trump is being accused of outsourcing his presidency to Elon Musk, so he insists that Biden was an empty vessel filled with the wants and the whims of the meddlers in his midst. Criminality, pliability — those become stock accusations, white noise.
And Biden can’t merely have been a flawed president — he must have been a catastrophic one. That way, anything still wrong under Trump simply reflects the difficulty of climbing out of a hole as deep as the one that the Biden administration dug.
“Look where Biden took us,” Trump told Congress that night. “Very low. The lowest we’ve ever been.”
That’s bonkers. But we’re descending far and fast now.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Globe & Mail of Toronto, Shannon Proudfoot pondered tariffs and tantrums: “Once you cross off all the things this trade war is not about, all the problems it does nothing to solve or makes much worse, you are left with one thing it does accomplish. It makes Mr. Trump — again, more, always and forever — the center of attention, a human wildfire creeping toward the village, a cosplay ocher emperor sitting on a treasury large enough that no one will point out that he’s lost his mind.” (Thanks to Robert Lemmon of Victoria, British Columbia, for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Jesús Rodríguez traced America’s history with the Gulf of Mexico: “‘Do we wish to acquire to our own confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces?’ Thomas Jefferson mused to President James Monroe in an 1823 letter, as if the Western Hemisphere was a West Elm catalog.” (Jennie Fogarty, Bethesda, Md.)
And Ron Charles defined the challenge to traditional news organizations, and democracy: “Social media companies like Facebook, Instagram and Elon Musk’s X — the platform formerly known as useful — have effectively drained journalism’s business model and lured away the audience with a rich diet of bigotry, frivolity and grift.” (Harri Kramer, Bethesda, Md., and Pam Pifer, Bothell, Wash.)
In a letter to the editor of The Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Arneberg remarked that Trump has “treated tariffs like a toddler playing with a light switch.” (Julie Edwards, Chicago)
In The Times, David Brooks explained many Republicans’ affinity for Vladimir Putin: “One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia.” (Jenny O’Farrell, Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Jessica Fitch, Corpus Christi, Texas, among many others)
Also in The Times, Sam Anderson described a long trek past changing scenery: “I felt relieved to be living in reality again, following the small rhythm of my legs over the big rhythm of the landscape, noticing the world, the houses under the clouds. Block by block, mile by mile, I felt my soul begin to unclench — like one of those mattresses that are shipped, supercompressed, in a tiny box.” (Betty Luman, The Woodlands, Texas)
And Michael Kimmelman reflected on one painting’s jarring temporary home in the former Whitney Museum while its permanent residence, the Frick Collection, was being refurbished: “Seeing Bellini’s ‘St. Francis in the Desert’ in a Brutalist building felt like coming across your high school chemistry teacher on spring break in Cocoa Beach.” (Andres Valdespino, Amenia, N.Y., and Stuart Sipkin, Golden, Colo., among many others)
In The Boston Globe, Beth Teitell scaled the pampering heights of a luxury high-rise: “It was frigid out, and so icy that all over town pedestrians were tumbling. But on the 35th floor of the Millennium Residences at Winthrop Center, life felt as easy as a summer afternoon, and Richard Baumert was marveling at the lap pool: 75 feet long, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, its water a bewitching shade of … let’s call it concierge blue.” (Emily Andreano, Swampscott, Mass.)
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan mulled a quirk of the modern male’s development: “Watching online porn has become most adolescents’ first sexual experience. The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hard-core porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War. (Probably a good thing, because we really needed to win that one.)” (Reid Cushman, Miami)
Also in The Atlantic, Susan Tallman examined the legacy of a wealthy man with a passion for paintings: “Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy.” (Nancy Doran, Richland, Wash.)
In The London Review of Books, Adam Mars-Jones recognized the lineage of privilege, including a female forebear who founded French Vogue, that helped make the writer Dominique Fernandez’s visionary boldness possible: “Some people get a better view because they are standing on the shoulders of giants, others because they’re standing on a stack of Granny’s address books.” (Keith Niall, Toronto)
And in The Irish Times, Patrick Freyne reviewed a British dating show: “Meeting the contestants is also an opportunity to see job descriptions that the labor economist Richard Scarry never dreamed of. Ryan, for example, is a ‘tanning business owner.’ And Yolanda is ‘a Mel B impersonator.’ Fake tan and the Spice Girls are, of course, Britain’s main industries since Brexit.” (D.M. O’Donnell, Dublin)
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 Writing, Reading and Doing
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Is there no nominee so outrageous, no fit of cruelty so extreme and no economic decision so knee-jerk that Republican lawmakers stir from their moral coma and murmur a meaningful protest of Trump’s madness? It’s terrifying. It’s deeply sad. And it’s in that vein that I wrote this recent examination of one Republican senator, Thom Tillis, who represents my state of North Carolina, which is ever the political petri dish.
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In The Assembly, Christopher Cooper explained that while Tillis’s behavior may suggest worry about a Republican primary challenge next year, there’s reason for him to feel confident: “In the 21st century only a handful of incumbent senators lost their primaries in a regular election.”
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I have subjected readers of this newsletter to many, many reveries about dogs. (Well, my dog, the splendiferous Regan.) But fair is fair: Here’s a recent article in The Times about the medical mysteries of cats.
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The volume of coverage of Elon Musk makes it difficult for anyone to make fresh observations about him. But George Pendle cleared that bar with this likening of Musk to Henry Ford in Air Mail. Pendle described the surreal moment in the White House last week when Trump peddled Musk’s wares, urging Americans to buy more Teslas. “This was not a conflict of interest; it was a catastrophe of interest,” Pendle wrote, adding this reminder: “Back in 2017, Kellyanne Conway was reprimanded by the Office of Government Ethics for inadvertently telling Americans to ‘go buy Ivanka’s stuff.’ But Trump fired the director of O.G.E. last month.” Those were the days.
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I’m delighted to be joining my Times Opinion colleague Ross Douthat for a Veritas Forum event, “In Search of Something More: Stories of Suffering, Belief and What It All Means,” at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where our conversation will be moderated by Molly Worthen. It’s at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8, and you can find more details and register here.
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On Tuesday night, I’ll be at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Fla., discussing the challenges that higher education and the media face. Details here. Back home in Chapel Hill, I’ll interview David A. Graham, a staff writer for The Atlantic, about his new book, “The Project,” which examines the second Trump administration’s plans to remake America, on April 29; details here. Also in Chapel Hill, on May 27, I’ll interview Molly Worthen about her new book, “Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump”; details here. I keep a list of my upcoming appearances on my website.
On a Personal Note
I’m a broken record with my students when it comes to Joan Didion’s nonfiction: I’ve always found that there’s something about the diction, the syntax, the rhythm of her best paragraphs that seeds better writing. Plant enough Didion in your head and at least a few flowers of your own grow. I’m partial to Didion’s early essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.” I could read “Goodbye to All That,” from the former, every day. From the latter, I could read “On the Morning After the Sixties” on endless repeat.
But this isn’t about Didion. It’s about a conversation with a student in my Duke office the other day and how talk of Didion turned to talk of William Butler Yeats and his poem “The Second Coming,” whose ending Didion evoked:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The two of us read those lines aloud, marveled at their beauty and were soon talking about Sylvia Plath, about Dylan Thomas, about poetry in general and how it invites readers to luxuriate in language in a way that even the best fiction seldom does. We agreed that we needed more poetry in our lives.
I spent 15 minutes reading poetry after the student left. At home that night, I spent 30 more. With its artistry and its empathy, poetry offered me the kind of refuge I need these days more than ever. I pass that along for whatever it’s worth.
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