Frank Bruni: Bret, I’m utterly fascinated and deeply amused by all the efforts over the past week to read President Trump’s post-midterms mood and project exactly how he’ll quack and precisely how he’ll waddle as he dons the sad feathers of a lame duck. I mean, we’re talking about Trump here. He’s erratic and incoherent on his most triumphant days. What do you think we can expect from him in sweeping, mortifying, eviscerating defeat?
Bret Stephens: His choice of Stephen Miller as his next chief of staff says it all: two years of bruising political combat; no outreach to Democrats; no grace in defeat; no acknowledgment of political reality; no interest in giving another Republican a fighting chance to succeed him.
Frank: So it’s all truculence all the time? Grudges galore and a permanent snit? I suppose that’s the thrust of the ludicrous letter that the chief White House counsel, Will Scharf, wrote to Representative Robert Garcia of California, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, warning him that aggressive investigations into the conduct of Trump and his aides “may cross the line into blatant criminality.” Maybe Scharf was rehearsing material for some new stand-up act? He’s certainly ignoring all the Americans whose votes made clear that they have plenty of qualms and questions about the conduct of this White House.
Bret: You know the old fable about the scorpion and the frog, Frank? Well, Trump is the scorpion and America is the frog that elected him twice. And got stung twice, too.
Frank: Will the scorpion — and Miller, who’s maybe a tarantula in this formulation — be able to do much concrete damage through executive orders and other actions that ignore and sideline Congress, or are you describing what will mostly be ugly theater? And even if it’s just ugly theater, where does that leave Americans who, I think, just begged politicians to calm down, grow up and reclaim a smidgen of dignity?
Bret: If only Miller were as docile and relatively harmless as a tarantula, Frank. Miller is going to take Barack Obama’s notorious motto from 2014, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” — meaning that he intended to bypass a hostile Congress through executive orders — and take it to a whole new level of aggression, all of it with a view toward achieving two things: making Democrats look weak or goading them into overreaction. I don’t envy Hakeem Jeffries and … uh, whoever becomes Senate majority leader.
Frank: Let’s come back to the question of the Senate majority leader in a few minutes, because it’s important and there’s lots to say about it. But first, allow me a quibble: While your Obama invocation is well taken and it’s legitimate to point out that Trump is hardly the first president to try to amass and exert extracurricular power, I’m so tired of this habit of framing him and his behavior in terms of his immediate predecessors. That dilutes his megalomania, his madness, his cruelty, his destructiveness. The historic extent of the Democrats’ midterm success is in fact a testament to Trump’s being in a miserable category of his own. He and Obama do not belong in the same sentence or paragraph.
Bret: I agree in the sense that Trump is the Nigel Tufnel of American politics: His dials all go to 11, both as a measure of his decibels and a gauge of his I.Q.
I disagree in the sense that Democrats have repeatedly set precedents that haunt them when the other guy does it. In the 1990s, Democrats loudly insisted that presidential character didn’t matter as long as they liked the policies they were getting. They later regretted it when the character in question was Trump’s. Democrats didn’t mind executive overreach from Obama when he was issuing executive orders about carbon regulation and migrant protection instead of seeking a legislative solution, or from Joe Biden when he tried to sidestep a Supreme Court ruling on student loan forgiveness or an eviction moratorium. Now they regret it. These are case studies in why it can be useful, at least in the long term, to set a good example and respect the constitutional and traditional limitations of office.
Frank: And Trump would have been mindful of — and restrained by — that good example? Look, I don’t applaud or endorse any of the Democratic behavior you just described. And you described it accurately. My complaint is with this common reflex, when appraising the offenses and outrages of Trump and his administration, to add: Then again, the Democrats … As if we must distribute wrongdoing equally in order to be credible in calling out a given instance of it. Trump’s misdeeds have precedent, absolutely. Many aren’t unusual in kind. But they’re so unusual in scale that they defy comparison. And the magnitude of his self-enrichment, the viciousness with which he sought to prosecute his perceived political enemies, the indecency with which he smeared opponents and the indiscriminate sadism with which ICE terrorized Americans — there’s no “but the Democrats” to be appended to discussions of any of that.
Bret: My point isn’t that Trump’s transgressions aren’t worse. My point is that Democrats opened doors and Trump drove truck bombs through them.
Can we get back to the Senate and who will lead it?
Frank: Please. I have thoughts. And worries. And ambivalence.
Bret: Because you don’t want the country to be led by a congressman from Brooklyn and a senator from Brooklyn, squaring off against a president from Queens and a chief of staff from the Planet of Evil?
Frank: That’s part of it, yes. On one hand, Chuck Schumer — that senator from Brooklyn — deserves enormous credit and huge gratitude for the party’s phenomenal midterm performance. He courted and insisted on Senate candidates — Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Roy Cooper in North Carolina are prime examples — who were utterly right for their races and who, sure enough, prevailed. He’s a brilliant man and an exceptional politician. There’s a strong argument for making him the Senate majority leader, as he was under President Biden.
But Democrats just broadened their map, romping in states and regions that had seemed inhospitable to them only months ago. Their voters elected a diverse array of candidates who reflect a desire for generational change. Schumer, 75, doesn’t represent that. And if the party’s leadership come January is him and his fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries, 56, as speaker of the House, that doesn’t do justice to what happened and doesn’t say to all the Americans who just voted Democratic that their message was heard and a new day is here.
Bret: Whatever doubts I had about Schumer as majority leader ended the moment another Brooklyn-born alter kaker, Bernie Sanders, came out and opposed him. The job of Senate majority leader is basically an insider role: It requires legislative experience and acumen, which Schumer has in spades, and a feeling for the needs of the entire caucus, which will now include at least five, but probably six or seven, Democrats from previously — and potentially — red states. Those six or seven are the Democratic majority, and they will not be eager for the party to take a hard left turn. With the arguable exception of Delaware’s Chris Coons, I’m not sure there’s another Democrat who can fill that role, and none who has done more to earn it.
Frank: You’ve put your finger on why I have such ambivalence. Schumer is fit for the job, has indeed earned it and, well, who better and who else? It’s interesting that Sanders has been joined, sort of, by a Democrat of a much different ideological stripe — Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan — in questioning whether Schumer should lead Senate Democrats. It’s nuts, though, that some of his Democratic detractors are dismissing him as too moderate for a moment of progressive ascent. What progressive ascent? Yes, many progressives in the party just won their midterm races. So, by my count, did a greater number of moderates — and in places and by margins that suggest that the Democratic Party will badly squander this moment of victory if they tack hard to the left.
Bret: Democrats have been handed another gift in the form of Jim Jordan, the new House Republican leader. All he’ll want to do is pick fights. There’s an opportunity here for Democrats to spend the next two years underscoring their seriousness and sobriety against the G.O.P. clown show. But that’s going to require resisting the perennial “Animal House” temptation that a “really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.” I’m talking about trying to impeach Trump or shutting down the government or defunding the Department of Homeland Security. The sharpest contrast that anyone can draw in politics today isn’t between the hard right and hard left. It’s between MAGA and MASA — the “S” in that second acronym standing for “sane.”
Frank: My read of the midterm results is that voters are imploring politicians to spend less time preening, less time performing, less time squabbling among themselves in ways that often seem driven by spite and vanity and more time trying to fix what needs fixing in his country — health care, aspects of the tax code, K-through-12 education — so that more Americans can live free of keen economic anxiety and full of robust aspiration. If Democrats seem most intent on punishing all the monsters in the Trump administration who, yes, very much deserve it, they will be serving neither themselves nor America in the long run. It’s tempting, at this moment, for Democratic politicians and party loyalists to exercise — in the hopes of exorcising — their wholly warranted rage. It’s also a trap.
Bret: Agree. It would be much wiser for congressional Democrats to set some traps for Trump instead. For instance, how about offering full funding for the rest of the border wall in exchange, at long last, for citizenship for Dreamers and an absolute end to the policy of deporting migrants to third countries to which they have no connection whatsoever? Or restoring the expired Obamacare tax credits in exchange for setting up a bipartisan congressional task force dedicated to rooting out Medicare and Medicaid fraud, somewhat along the lines that a Long Island Democrat, Representative Tom Suozzi, has been pushing? Doesn’t the secret to martial arts lie in using your opponent’s force against him?
Frank: Those are interesting ideas, and while I’d have to sit for a bit with the exact details and mechanics of them, I fully salute their underlying spirit. Let’s redeem compromise as a triumph of maturity rather than a surrender of principle. Let’s look for any possible points of consensus and embrace them without getting tripped up by calculations of who will wind up with political credit. And let’s pursue an acronym that’s kissing cousins with MASA: MACA. The “C” is for “civil.”
On that positive note, Bret, have you heard or read anything over the past week that moved or inspired you?
Bret: Yes, but first on the topic of making America civil again: My friend the historian Alvin Felzenberg wrote to me to say that I was unfair to the memory of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. when I called him an anti-Israel Republican in my column this week. That was a Democratic attack line when Lodge ran as Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1960, based on his record as Dwight Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations during the Suez crisis in 1956. But Alvin, who knows his history far better than I do, tells me it’s unfair to the memory of H.C.L., who “remains swell.” So my apologies to all the Lodges and Cabots in their many illustrious generations.
Frank: Contrition and conciliation look good on you, Bret — and they’re C-words that, like compromise and consensus and civility, are due for a comeback.
Bret: One more thing: Our readers mustn’t miss Clay Risen’s exceptionally thoughtful, erudite and moving account of how Times obituarists write about subjects who die by suicide. It’s a crushingly difficult subject, where the writer must weigh obligations to the truth against the pain of survivors, many of whom would rather leave the precise cause of death out of the public narrative. Having recently lost a very close friend this way, I’ve wrestled with whether, and how, I will ever write about him. “We always have to remember that behind these obituaries are families and friends grappling with a loved one’s decision,” Clay wrote, “and hoping that they can transcend despair to find a way to accept it.” If only our politics were as sensitive, or half as intelligent.
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