Frank Bruni: Bret, President Trump has set the bar for his own ridiculousness so high that he seldom does or says anything anymore that makes me laugh out loud or gasp in revulsion. But his announcement this week that his 250-foot-high triumphal arch would be a cupboard for drones and a pedestal for snipers? Wow. I need your take on it, because I think we may finally have the cuckoo project that perfectly captures our peacock president.
Bret Stephens: The whole project feels like the architectural love child of Albert Speer and the Black Queen of Sogo from Barbarella.
The consolation is that this thing is never going to be built — unlike, I’m sorry to say, the new ballroom that’s going up at speed on the White House grounds. Will you join me in urging the next president to tear it down, restore the old East Wing, and pass legislation forbidding changes to cherished American monuments without the approval and funding of Congress?
Frank: Yeesh, Bret, you’ve tossed me a real softball. Of course I’ll join you. But legislation isn’t any guaranteed fix: What Trump has taught us is that laws are no obstacle for potentates with contempt for them. He has set an example of exaggerating executive authority and exploiting the teensiest of loopholes to swing the wrecking ball, actually as well as metaphorically, before anyone or anything can stop it. So the prospect of Congress waving a red flag in front of a future Trump doesn’t calm and reassure me. But the repudiation of what Trump has done by undoing it? Sign me up.
Bret: Sigmund Freud once diagnosed Woodrow Wilson with an Oedipus complex. (Really.) Now we’ve got a president with an edifice complex. When will the psychiatric profession name a complex for a person who neither wants to have sex with a parent nor build monuments to himself?
Frank: The arch, the ballroom, the gutting of the Kennedy Center — they’ve helped me understand something I didn’t fully appreciate before. Though Trump is constantly called a builder, he’s the opposite. He’s a destroyer. Every edifice he creates or renovates (which is too kind a term) is a middle finger to what came before, a mockery of established taste, an insult and belittling of the people he dislikes. That’s why his fans don’t reject his architectural escapades as pure vaingloriousness. In giving physical form to his own contempt, Trump indulges and satisfies theirs.
Bret: The word for everything Trump does is “meretricious,” whose Latin root, meretrix — you can look it up — gets at the fundamental vulgarity of his tastes. But you’re right that he’s also engaging in a kind of psycho-political warfare against people like, well, us: anyone who prizes understatement and decorum and restraint. When we react with horror to things like his Napoleonic (complex) arch, it sets us up as self-important prigs and tedious bluestockings, gnashing our teeth against this brash but all-American parvenu. MAGA world laps it up because we wind up turning ourselves into the very caricatures of everything they hate.
Which, by the way, is what I think he’s doing by expelling CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House press corps: picking a fight with the people his people most love to hate.
Frank: Indeed. From the start, journalists have been his preferred demons, his go-to foils. Hanging us in effigy is his cardio — and it gets at his fundamental dishonesty and his riot of contradictions. More of him loves than hates us, because we can grant or deny him the only commodity he covets and relishes more than gold, more than oil, more than monuments. We bestow attention, without which he wilts. That’s why the recent decision of several television networks not to send their cameras to White House events from which CNN, MS NOW and Politico are barred is so interesting. It could drive him (even more) bananas. If a Trump babbles at the Resolute Desk and no one is around to record it, did he really make a fool of himself?
Bret: Alternatively, does he get to make a fool of the rest of us?
One of my mistakes, from which I’m now in intermittent recovery, was my obsessive hostility toward him during his first presidential campaign and the early years of his first term. Not because I didn’t think he warranted the hostility: He did, does and always will. It’s because I realized it was doing nothing to hurt him and quite a lot to help him. Trump’s political genius lies in goading his opponents; paying him less attention isn’t a satisfying way of diminishing him, but it’s the only way.
Now, having said that, I think banning those news outlets is an outrage, I tell you!
Frank: Atop the outrage the day before it and the outrage the day before that. Here’s a serious question, Bret, because we haven’t gotten this right yet and the midterms are less than six weeks away and there’s no better time for us to finally figure it out: How do we — meaning not just the news media but also the voters who go to No Kings rallies and the Democrats vying for House or Senate seats — decide which outrages to scream about and which to ignore? Trump counts on our swinging at every pitch (what is it with me and baseball metaphors today?), because that blurs the crucial distinction between his grossest misconduct and his mere grossness.
Bret: You touched on this in your terrific column this week: The people who won’t shut up about the president’s weight or hair dye or skin tone — especially when they are the same people who stayed mum about Joe Biden’s physical deterioration — are only helping him by feeding the very cultural resentments that fuel his base. But I also think the mainstream news media could help itself a lot if it just pruned every tendentious adjective from every story it writes about Trump. Those of us who believe in architectural understatement when it comes to our monuments should practice rhetorical understatement when it comes to our presidential criticism. Not because we are trying to mute our point, but rather because it’s a much more effective way of being heard.
Frank: Not sure I entirely agree with you about understatement, Bret. Ten years ago, I would have. But in the screech of this social-media moment? Restraint is retro. To practice subtlety is to bring an overcooked strand of linguine to a sword fight. But maybe I’m just smarting because you want to do away with tendentious adjectives and that leaves me with nothing but conjunctions and the occasional verb.
Bret: Don’t sell yourself short, Frank. Like the president, you have the best nouns. The biggest nouns.
Frank: Some even have drones inside them!
Bret: Change of subject, Frank. The cultural contretemps of our day involves a three-hit wonder named Macklemore whose onstage pro-Palestinian declarations (along with a past record of antisemitic outfits, including an oversized prosthetic nose) got him kicked off as an opening act from Ed Sheeran’s tour, mostly from pressure from the owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, who told Sheeran that dropping the rapper was a condition for him playing at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts.
My view is: Good for Kraft. Macklemore can say whatever he wants offstage, but music fans don’t come to concerts for political lectures, and stadium owners don’t have to lend their venues to artists whose views offend them and a good many audience members. What do you think?
Frank: I agree wholeheartedly that music fans don’t attend performances for political lectures and that Kraft was 100 percent within his rights. But was he being smart? Was it tactically wise for others to demand that Macklemore not be allowed onstage? I worry that what happened will fuel the very antisemitism of which Macklemore is being accused. As Roxane Gay pointed out in a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, we’re wildly inconsistent in what political talk we welcome from performers and artists and what makes us uncomfortable — just as performers and artists are wildly inconsistent about when they readily promulgate their political views and when they say, “I don’t get into politics, I just want everyone to have a good time.”
Bret: There will always be inconsistencies and hypocrisies. The real question for Sheeran and other artists is whether they are prepared to allow their shows to be hijacked by the political hobbyhorses of their entourages. And the clear answer is no.
As for the unintended consequences, you may be right; Macklemore will probably enjoy a brief bump in his fading celebrity. The question is, if Macklemore were using a geopolitical crisis in Africa or Latin America to spout off in ways that seriously offended Black or Hispanic audience members, would any stadium owner be expected to put up with it? I doubt it.
Frank: Agree totally about the double standard. Where things always get tricky — maybe not in Macklemore’s case but in others — is whether someone’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli comments should be received as a denigration of all Jews. Often that’s a reflexive or cynical misreading of the person’s position. But Macklemore addressed his remarks “to all of my Jewish brothers and sisters” in an odd manner that suggested an equation of Israelis and Jews — despite the fact many Jews have condemned the actions of the current Israeli government. That seemed to me revealingly sloppy and deliberately provocative.
Bret: The thing is, I actually like the hit song that is his main claim to fame: a clever rap called “Thrift Shop.” I’m also a fan of a lot of Pink Floyd songs, never mind bassist Roger Walters’s blatant antisemitism. I’d say the same thing even about Kanye West, or whatever he calls himself these days. As a music lover, I try not to impose a political or even moral litmus test on the artists I like. As musicians, I wish they’d return the favor by not trying to impose their politics or morality on me.
Frank: “Impose” is the key word. Musicians, actors, painters — they obviously don’t sacrifice the right to hold and share their views by becoming entertainers and artists, and sometimes their finest work is animated by their fiercest political convictions. Think of the Bruce Springsteen records that chronicle America’s broken promises and betrayal of the working class. But I want to be able to savor a gorgeous song or lose myself in a mesmerizing canvas without some ideological jeremiad that its creator recently delivered rattling around in my head. I want — hell, I need — undistracted moments of unalloyed beauty.
Bret: That’s why Trump is offering us his 250-foot arch.
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