Around the same time last week that President Trump decreed two dolls to be plenty for a child in our tariff-turvy country, his son Eric was many time zones away, supping at the trough of excess. In gilded Dubai, he celebrated plans for a $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower there. That characteristically understated edifice — with what Eric called “the tallest swimming pool in the world” — will undoubtedly make the Trump patriarch and the Trump progeny shine richer than ever.
As will so much else that the gluttonous Gotrocks are up to, frenziedly capitalizing on their political capital. Five pencils may be adequate for an American pupil — that was the allotment that President Trump advised, given the wages of his trade wars — but no number of billions is enough for him and his avaricious brood. The presidency, to their thinking, isn’t a privilege. It’s a profit center, one that involves cryptocurrency ventures abetted by crypto-friendly policies, foreign real estate deals augmented by foreigners’ desires to be on President Trump’s good side and extensive merchandising that’s not so much coincident with his perch atop the U.S. government but contingent on it.
Many observers are aghast. They say there’s no modern precedent for this. And the financial magnitude and convolutions of the Trump clan’s budding crypto empire are such that Senate Democrats just drafted and introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act, which would forbid presidents, vice presidents, federal lawmakers and their immediate families from issuing digital assets.
But as unseemly as the Trumps’ avarice is on its own, it’s doubly so in terms of the president’s contradictory message to voters. They’re supposed to tighten their belts while he gorges on all he can. They’re forced to parcel out classroom basics while he wallows in opulence. Let them use Sharpies.
Sure, he has promised Americans that they, too, will scale new heights of wealth — eventually. But while they skimp, he splurges, in every way imaginable and more expansively than before. Trump’s return to the presidency has been the apotheosis of his trademark ethos: all gilt and no guilt.
“Graspy” is what my colleague Maureen Dowd recently called it, explaining: “We’ve never seen a president doing business like he’s doing with the memecoin and his crypto company, where the conflict of interest becomes a confluence of interest.”
She was referring to the Trump administration’s crypto-friendly ways, which just so happen to benefit the recent expansion of the Trump family’s business portfolio into crypto, and to President Trump’s announcement last month of an “unforgettable Gala DINNER with the President on May 22” for the top 220 investors in $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency launched just before the inauguration. That enticement did what he no doubt meant it to; the memecoin’s price surged as news of the gala spread.
For the president, at least, the times are flush and the digs are plush. He has redecorated the Oval Office by hanging new portraits with gold frames, arraying golden urns across the mantel and adding other golden accents elsewhere. I think we misinterpreted that $50,000 gold Rolex that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, wore when posing before inmates in El Salvador as a personal indulgence. It was really a presidential tribute.
Cost is no object when Trump is feeling imperial. The huge military parade that he’s planning for next month could have a price tag as high as $45 million, according to NBC News. “Peanuts compared to the value of doing it,” Trump said in a recent interview on the NBC News show “Meet the Press.” “We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it.”
Because nothing buoys the spirits of Americans contemplating a lean Christmas like armored vehicles rolling through the streets around the White House? That’s the kind of perverse dissonance at which this administration excels. Trump entrusts the evisceration of federal programs that serve low-income voters to the world’s richest man. He surrounds himself with billionaires while strapped farmers fret. And he stokes national pride — on the heels of “Gulf of America,” he has called for days of remembrance that brush allies to the side and single out America’s unrivaled role in World War II — as consumer confidence sinks. Maybe he believes there’s a salve for all, some transformative magic, in ramping up the facilely patriotic superlatives. Call it trickle-down triumphalism.
It’s the sort of thing that connects Trump to despots past and present. They have long leaned on exaggerated proclamations of potency and flamboyant assertions of grandeur to distract their citizens from unfulfilled promises and unsatisfied wants. The bigger they are, the more their subjects believe in them, or so the thinking goes. But there’s another possibility: that the little people just feel all the smaller.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times, John Branch explored a part of the Golden State less photographed and celebrated than its coves and crests: “Much of California’s interior is a table-flat landscape lined by ruler-straight roads stretching toward distant mountains. It is an earthen version of graph paper.” (Thanks to Chip Scanlan of St. Petersburg, Fla., and Dan Humiston of McKinleyville, Calif., for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Molly Young suffered through a trip to Finland: “I stopped at a bar for a drink and felt worse after finishing it, as I knew I would, given alcohol’s peerless capacity to italicize whatever mood the drinker is already in.” (Mark Muellerleile, Mahtomedi, Minn., and Clare McKillop, Devon, England, among others)
In The Times of London, Charlotte Ivers enjoyed her libation more: “I ordered a Welsh rhubarb pisco sour,” she wrote. “It was wonderful: thicker and more bitter than all my enemies combined.” (Larry Durland, Bethlehem, Pa.)
In The Washington Post, Ty Burr savaged the screenplay for the new movie “Another Simple Favor”: “It is a cringe contest of forced banter, bald exposition, dialogue that sags rather than snaps and plot developments that don’t twist so much as spiral into incredulity like a failed SpaceX launch.” (Natalie Fernandez, Manhattan)
Also in The Post, Dana Milbank listened carefully to recent Senate testimony by Doug Collins, the secretary for Veterans Affairs: “Collins, speaking in a drawl and with the rapid-fire cadence of an auctioneer, often ended his thoughts midsentence and positioned his subjects in vehement disagreement with his verbs.” (Karin Dyhr Daugaard, Holbaek, Denmark, and Liz Wanschura, Caledonia, Minn.)
And Drew Goins weighed in on that ration of little plastic people: “One supposes that President Donald Trump is correct that Americans technically could scrape by with ‘two dolls’ instead of ’30 dolls.’ The problem is that Americans like having 30 dolls, or 30 pairs of Nikes, or — perhaps not 30 TVs, but at least more than one, because sometimes you and all your dolls want to watch different programs.” (Esther S. Trakinski, Hillsdale, N.Y.)
In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce imagined the ideal response by several journalists with The Atlantic who recently interviewed Trump: “When a president of the United States says, ‘I run the country and the world,’ there are only two legitimate follow-up questions: 1. ‘Will you excuse me? I have to get someone a bed in the psych ward,’ and 2. ‘Does that window open from the inside?’” Pierce wrote. (Pat Leonard, Randolph, N.J.)
In The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh puzzled over modern claims to manliness: “Years from now, historians will wonder how liberals lost any reputation for machismo to pampered Silicon Valley oddballs and a U.S. vice president who gives every impression of owning a lightsaber.” (Brett Jones, Charlottesville, Va.)
In The Contrarian, Jennifer Rubin recognized that many of Trump’s splenetic fiats are unconstitutional and so it’s best not to overreact each time he “coughs up one of these executive fur balls.” (Suzanne Ashlock, Homewood, Ill., and Robert McKeown, Pisgah Forest, N.C.)
And in The Atlantic, Josh Tyrangiel checked in on Anthony Weiner’s campaign for New York City Council in downtown Manhattan’s District 2, which tilts progressive: “Just 8 percent of the district’s 175,000 residents are registered Republicans. Fresh Defund the Police graffiti appears regularly. Our rats share their pronouns.” Also: “The minimalist composer Philip Glass is a longtime District 2 resident. I mention this because the Weiner campaign is basically just two loud hunches, played repeatedly, in a way that may or may not cohere into a melody.” (Martin Freeland, Stanford, Calif., and Tracy Corbett, Nanaimo, British Columbia)
I was partial to Tyrangiel’s reflection on whether Weiner is a Rorschach: “One consequence of living in an age when nothing seems to matter is a tendency, at least in some people, to overcorrect and insist that everything matters. The return of Anthony Weiner raises Big Societal Questions, and if that’s your thing, have at it.”
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 Watching, Listening To and Reading
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Do the movie director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp ever sleep? Their evidently furious pace of work is such that they’ve had two very different collaborations — the ghost story “Presence” and the spy thriller “Black Bag” — released in the first half of this year. “Black Bag” is the more recent and better of the two; it’s now streaming on several platforms for a rental fee (and on Peacock for free). I made the mistake of watching it in multiple sittings and multitasking all the while, so its overly intricate plot, about an unidentified mole among a group of audaciously mendacious British spooks, got away from me a bit. No matter! Its cast (Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Marisa Abela) is so fine, its direction so stylish and its dialogue so wickedly barbed that I could simply revel in it scene by scene.
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At some point in the crazily prolific career of the singer, songwriter and exuberant pianist Tori Amos, I stopped following her — her self-indulgence and peculiarities muscled out the pop sensibility that they’d always jousted with so intriguingly. But I found her early albums satisfying. For every track that was just a baffling oddity, another was an idiosyncratic beauty. And her lyrics, though frequently opaque, included individual lines or couplets of sharp, accessible poetry. In the song “Tear in Your Hand,” she tells a lover leaving her for someone else, “Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.” In “Hey Jupiter,” this is how she evokes the experience of someone walking all over her: “If my heart’s soaking wet/Boy, your boots can leave a mess.” But few of her songs have a narrative line as discernible and moving as “Playboy Mommy,” a messed-up mother’s apology (of sorts) to a daughter who “came before I found/The magic how to keep her happy.” It’s a gem.
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As a restaurant lover (and a former restaurant critic), I savored this Times retrospective on the past 25 years of dining out in New York City. I made my own small contribution to it, recalling the opening — and significance — of Momofuku Ssam Bar.
Retire These Words!
My friends know me to be melodramatic. Histrionic. Not in my actual behavior — I’m plenty practical in how I go about a given day, and even stoic when circumstances demand that — but in my affect and in my casual storytelling, which is laden with superlatives and dripping in italics and exclamation points. I was never merely hungry. I was famished! The driver who swerved in front of me didn’t just come within inches of denting my car. He almost killed me! I saw the tunnel! The light!
Even so, I’ve not fallen prey to an overused, pretentious, precious term in heavy rotation these days, as Michael Hogan, a newsletter reader from Geelong, Australia, pointed out:
“It feels like every damn thing I do is labeled a journey,” he wrote. “I don’t buy a drill. I’m on a home improvement journey. I don’t see my doctor. I’m on a wellness journey. I don’t deposit money into my bank account. I’m on a wealth journey.”
“Make it stop,” he pleaded.
If only I possessed such superpowers! But I can indeed echo his lament, second his wish and ponder the spread — make that metastasis — of “journey.”
Maybe it’s a byproduct of the era’s narcissism, a companion to all the selfies and Instagram stories and a social media landscape in which people are always positioning themselves in the foreground, where they pose just so. It’s semantic self-aggrandizement, turning an errand into an adventure, a routine into a religion.
Speaking of which, maybe “journey” is a spiritual thing. At least in the United States, fewer and fewer people belong to church groups or identify with given faiths, whose insistence on a grand design to existence — a divine hand in events — presumably holds less sway. But a desire for meaning surely persists. And so humdrum activities become heroic acts.
Those are my best guesses. File them under “etymological escapade” or “intellectual odyssey.”
On second thought, don’t.
“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. A previous installment, about the blight of variations on Make America Great Again, appeared in this newsletter.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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