Who needs a press secretary or a briefing room when you have superlatives, the caps lock key and your own Truth Social account? That seemed to be President Trump’s thinking last week as he took it upon himself to provide celebratory bulletins of dubious accuracy about his administration’s military strikes against Iran.
The damage, Trump announced, was “monumental.” It achieved the “Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities,” then a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE.” Political analysts marveled at the real-time rawness of his narration — no intermediaries, no filter. Just the American president talking directly to the American people.
Or, rather, crowing. That’s what struck me — not the novelty of the communications strategy but the nakedness of the bragging. Boast upon boast upon boast. War is a grave business; must it, like every aspect of Trump’s presidency, be reduced to yet another stage for him to strut across?
I suppose so, given the pathologies of the man. The crudeness of the times.
And the stiffness of the competition: Another, richer exhibitionist was also inviting the world’s gaze and also presenting himself as a paragon of potency, although he used tact-busting nuptials instead of bunker-busting bombs. Jeff Bezos was getting married to Lauren Sánchez, and the long prelude to and luxe festivities surrounding the event were less a paean to romance than a cartoon of extravagance. In photographs she oozed decadence. He dripped self-satisfaction. They seemed always to know — and always to glow — when cameras were upon them. And while there was some murmuring about their desire for privacy, it wasn’t remotely convincing. You’re not being demure when you’ve summoned a caravan of Kardashians to your bash.
I’m confused. When someone is as insistent as Trump that everything has gone right, I suspect something has gone wrong. When someone projects virility, coolness and fabulousness as strenuously as Bezos does, I assume deep insecurity about those attributes and more. That’s the self-defeating paradox of extreme bravado. It cops to the very reality it’s trying to refute.
Imagine if, instead of conveniently characterizing the attack on Iran as some once-in-a-generation masterstroke of peerless efficacy, Trump had said: “I’m certain that we significantly slowed Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, and I’m as eager as everyone else to pinpoint how much. But whatever the case, we weakened a dangerous country and degraded an evil regime. All of us should be grateful for that.”
That would ring true. It would take much of his ego out of the equation. And it would limit the amount of skeptical reporting about what had and hadn’t been accomplished. There’s no disproving “we don’t know yet.”
But obvious hyperbole demands investigation and correction, and so, over the past week, reporters have been digging, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fuming, Trump has been threatening yet more lawsuits against news organizations and an important matter of national security has degenerated into another ugly tussle over the truth. Not because the news media lacks patriotism, as Trump and his minions routinely and facilely claim. Because Trump lacks any modesty and all restraint.
Imagine if Bezos tried for a quieter wedding. Chose a location less look-at-me than Venice, in a country whose language hadn’t given us the word paparazzi. Didn’t lard the guest list with boldface names. Some distant spectators might be taken with the sincerity of the occasion. A few might even ponder the tenderness of the couple’s love.
But Ivanka Trump, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Brady, that Whitman’s Sampler of Kardashians — I don’t believe for a nanosecond that they’re Bezos’ and Sánchez’ nearest and dearest, any more than I believe Sánchez rode Bezos’ rocket into space a few months ago because of an enduring interest in space exploration. The people toasting Bezos and Sánchez are flesh-and-blood totems of fame and exclusivity, moneybags mascots imported from the Met Gala or the Oscars or other celebrity petting zoos where the most important décor is the red carpet. And that rocket was the next step up from Bezos’ $500 million superyacht, a chance for his beloved to swap her bikini for a designer spacesuit. He’s fast running out of ostentatious chariots in which to tuck and display her. Perhaps he’s closing in on a time machine, which he and she can use to visit a previous gilded age.
Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.
Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.
For the Love of Sentences
As regular newsletter readers know, I every so often decide to give us all a mental health break and declare this section a politics-free zone. I hereby issue that declaration.
In The Washington Post, Rick Reilly rethought short-term home rentals. “Airbnbs, Vrbos and others have been going downhill like a hippo on a water slide,” he groused. He had war stories: “We stayed in a place in Rome once that gave us two towels for two weeks. No hand towels, no face towels, no bath towels. Just two in-between towels that looked like they’d been washed in the first aqueduct.” Different country, same luck: “This winter we booked a place in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with good reviews — and no windows. It did have a Romeo and Juliet balcony that was so close to the neighbor’s wall Juliet would’ve chipped a tooth looking for Romeo.” (Thanks to Virginia Matish of Chesapeake, Va., for calling attention to this.)
Also in The Post, Karen Heller paid tribute to the designer Claire McCardell, who worked in the fashion industry from the 1920s into the 1950s: “McCardell put women in ballet slippers, denim, leggings, modern bathing suits, dolman sleeves, leotards and wrap dresses (decades before Diane von Furstenberg). She gave women pockets, which had long been deemed unseemly in female attire, even empowering and dangerous, as they could conceal love letters, money, a pistol. Nobel Prizes have been bestowed for less.” (Janet Collier, Portland, Ore.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay appraised the gravity of a lower leg injury sustained by the Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton before the team’s final N.B.A. championship game against the Oklahoma City Thunder: “With apologies to the dairy industry, this is the most important calf in the heartland.” (Dianne Handza, Alexandria Township, N.J.)
In The Atlantic, Franklin Schneider made some important distinctions as he picked apart people’s addictions to their smartphones: “The cranky ‘Get off your darn phone!’ seems a little too close to ‘Get off my lawn!’ — a knee-jerk aversion to new things is, if not the root of all evil, then the root of all dullness. The popular exhortations to ‘be fully present in the moment’ also seem misguided. I think the person utterly absorbed in an Instagram Reel as they shuffle into the crosswalk against the light, narrowly saved by the ‘Ahem, excuse me’ double-tap on the horn that bus drivers use to tell you that you’re a split second from being reunited with your childhood dog, is probably living in the moment to a degree usually achieved only by Buddhist monks; the problem is just that it’s the wrong moment.” (Lisa de Alwis, Boulder, Colo., and Zann Gates, Sacramento, Calif.)
In The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg also sounded an alarm about our digital dazes, observing that virtual interactions provide a cheap, unearned imitation of meaningful contact: “People want the juice, but resent the effort of the squeeze.” Separately, he described the panicked neediness of his dogs when thunder strikes: “Yesterday, during a hellacious storm, the girls barged into my office while I was on a Zoom meeting like a SWAT team with a no-knock warrant.” (Valerie Ploumpis, Washington)
In The Times, Alex Traub traced the life of Fred Smith, the founder of a modern business mainstay: “FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a grade of C.” (John Sims, Ottawa, Ontario)
Also in The Times, Emma Bubola evoked Venetians’ feelings as ultra-affluent interlopers descended on their storied lattice of canals for the Bezos-Sánchez extravaganza: “For many of the people who have made the uncommon choice to stay in an impractical city rendered almost unlivable by tourism in the easyJet age, the event was a climax of the city’s betrayal, an American-size display of its contradictions. It was the capitulation of Venice’s identity, they said, reduced to a glittery backdrop for the family photos of the world’s new oligarchy.” (Jenni Burgess, Anchorage)
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.
Bonus Regan Picture!
I receive concerned and even angry emails from some of you when I fail to give you an update on my beloved Regan for three or four weeks; it has been more than a month this time around. For shame. I’m a horrid correspondent.
But she remains a splendiferous pooch. In full candor, she has had a rough time of late; at 11½ years old, she has recurring orthopedic issues. I don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty but can assure you that she receives excellent veterinary care and enormous attention from yours truly, whose blessings include the strength to lift her into and out of the car and to carry her up and down stairs if necessary. She’s my 55-pound set of furry kettle bells.
What trust our pets place in us. And what an ineffably sweet feeling it is to know that you’ve earned that and will always reward it. Regan equates my proximity with the impossibility of anything too horrible happening. I try daily to prove her right.
Retire These Words!
I have nothing against rhymes, nothing against marriage and nothing against contentment.
But I have plenty against a platitude that combines all three.
How in the name of spousal counsel was “happy wife, happy life” foisted upon us?
I’ll tell you what the all-knowing internet says: Back in 1903, a British newspaper published a short political poem that included the phrase, which was tucked into a vision of gainful employment and material comfort. That’s according to this source, echoed by others. A bromide was born.
It survived and now thrives; I hear it all the time. It wafts over from nearby conversations that I don’t mean to be eavesdropping on. Men I’m chatting with say it in and out of earshot of their beloveds. It’s like “the grass is always greener” or “when life gives you lemons,” a verbal reflex in wisdom’s garb.
But I don’t find it wise. I find it silly and creepy. Silly because, obviously, you’re better off if your life partner is satisfied, fulfilled, upbeat. No revelation there. Even so, I tripped across a reference to scholarly research into the question of whether a spouse’s happiness has an impact on yours. What’s next? A study on whether drinking water helps to alleviate thirst?
Creepy because of the insinuation that women are temperamental and demanding. That they must be pacified. Oddly, there are complaints on the aforementioned internet that “happy wife, happy life” is insulting to men because it minimizes their emotions and objectifies them as providers. But it’s husbands whom I most often hear happy-wifing and happy-lifing, in a manner that casts them as agents of conditional munificence who either know how to get in front of a problem or have learned their lesson.
“Happy wife, happy life” is where performative doting and self-congratulatory capitulation mingle. That’s an icky blend I can’t defend. If we’re going to be all singsong about it.
“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. A previous installment, about the ubiquity of “journey,” appeared in this newsletter. Here, here and here are other installments.
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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