Frank Bruni: Bret, steel yourself for a sentence I never expected to write, a preoccupation I never expected to have, words that shock, shake and shame me. I cannot stop wondering if I’ve sold Marjorie Taylor Greene short.
Bret Stephens: First off, Frank, it’s nice to be having this conversation in your house, glass of wine in my hand and Regan at your feet. Thanks for having me over.
Regarding M.T.G., it’s fascinating on so many levels: personal, political, even philosophical. My thought about the latter: The revolution always winds up eating its own, as Robespierre and Trotsky found out. Trump was the guy who let the lunatics out of the conservative asylum, Greene foremost among them. And now, no surprise, she’s turned on him. The question is whether this turns into a full-scale Republican schism or they find a way to paper over their differences for the time being. Your thoughts?
Frank: I make no predictions when it comes to the possible crackup of MAGA and comeuppance of Trump. Both the movement and the man have demonstrated a staying power well beyond what critics like me imagined, and my judgment is compromised by my yearning for the after-Trump.
Bret: Same here. I’m still struggling to live down my 2022 midterm postmortem column, “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished.” D’oh!
Frank: Oh, I’ve made countless mortifying proclamations of my own. Let’s not go there. Anyway, I find these recent developments fascinating for the reasons you articulate and for this one, too: Greene is the latest lesson in how complicated our politics and our politicians can be. Beneath her cartoon carapace of cruelty and conspiratorial thinking, she perhaps has some actual principles, along with an undeniable strain of courage. Who’d have thunk it?
Bret: Oh, you mean that she seems to be turning left? That’s just a reminder that if you go far enough to the right politically, you wind up sounding quite a lot like people on the far left, and vice versa. The so-called horseshoe theory of politics.
Frank: Is she the Secretariat and Bernie Sanders the Seabiscuit?
Bret: More like Mrs. Hyde to Trump’s Mr. Hyde. At any rate, I’m fascinated, in a horrified way, by MAGA’s transition into the antithesis of the Reaganite party I admired in the 1980s. Anti-free trade. Anti-immigration. Anti-NATO. Anti-free world. And, if Tucker Carlson’s dog whistles are anything to go by, increasingly antisemitic.
Frank: Thank you, thank you, thank you for mentioning his antisemitism — which isn’t just his antisemitism but also, obviously, Nick Fuentes’s and Candace Owens’s and that of many other provocateurs in their wretched ideological company. For too long, Bret, I’ve been bothered by a fixation on antisemitism in the ranks of progressives that wasn’t paired with attention to the Jew-hating foulness on the right. A recent column of yours remedied that. Why, though, has it taken so many commentators so long?
Bret: It’s too easy for partisans to point to the antisemitism of the other side — and ignore the bigots in their own house. The eruption of right-wing antisemitism was predictable in the age of MAGA, given that so many of its attitudes — on globalization, immigration, intellectualism in general — are the usual handmaidens of old-fashioned Jew hatred. It’s spreading fast among younger conservative men who think that hating Jews is just the latest transgressive way to “own the libs.”
And let me add: The religious identity of the unlamented Jeffrey Epstein isn’t helping things in the world of conspiracy theorists. Do you think the release of his files will add fuel to fire or help put matters to rest?
Frank: I think this is the beginning of the end of the Epstein obsession. We’re forgetting how much has already been released and how many investigative reporters have been digging into this mess for years. I doubt we have a whole lot more to learn. But I also doubt that all the files will see the light of day. Yes, Congress has spoken! But, um, this president and the lackeys and lickspittles in his administration have mastered the art of selective deafness when it comes to the legislative branch’s wishes.
Nonetheless, Trump has been damaged. His need to do an about-face and endorse the legislation to make the files public recognized that Republican lawmakers were defying him — and they hadn’t previously defied him much, if at all. He looks weak. Isolated. Even scared.
Bret: I’m really not sure this is going to matter for Trump beyond a few news cycles — barring, of course, some more bombshell revelations. Events move fast. We might be overthrowing the regime in Venezuela! (Good — I think.) Or imposing peace terms on Ukraine! (Bad — probably.) Or selling F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia! (Dumb —for sure.) Speaking of which, what did you make of the crown prince’s visit to Washington?
Frank: Well, I was repulsed by our president’s behavior when he and the prince took questions from reporters in the Oval Office. ABC News’s Mary Bruce asked him about what happened to the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — who, according to U.S. intelligence, was killed and dismembered at the prince’s direction — and Trump responded: “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about.” So that’s justification for state-sanctioned disarticulation? Lose a popularity contest and lose your limbs? Trump added: “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.” Things, Bret. Things. Like being murdered and having your body hacked up.
Bret: “Disarticulation”: Now there’s a euphemism for the ages.
Look, I thought the Biden administration was foolish to try to turn the crown prince into a pariah, only to later beg him to pump more oil. We’ll always need to have functional relationships with unsavory allies, including ones implicated in murders. But Trump’s special talent is to treat their very unsavoriness as their greatest virtue. So the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, who visited the White House the other week, was once a member of Al Qaeda? Trump’s answer was that everyone’s had a “rough past.” So the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supports Hamas and contrived to get his chief political rival sentenced to 2,000 years in prison? Trump calls him “fantastic.”
But if you’re a White House reporter who dares to ask an additional question about Epstein, then you’re “piggy.”
Frank: Yeah, that’s what he called Bloomberg News’s Catherine Lucey. He’s on a roll, Bret! As for his estimations of foreign leaders and his fondness for the most despicable of them, I see it as a kind of strategy. Mingle with a passel of short people and you look tall. Stand in a crowd of overweight people and you look thin. (Move over, Ozempic!)
Bret: You’re on a roll, Frank.
Frank: Consort with the world’s most brutal and corrupt strongmen and autocrats and you look like a measured and merciful philosopher. It’s a shame Pol Pot is no longer with us. Trump could have a Diet Coke with him right next to the killing fields.
Bret: On a serious note, though, Trump has also had foreign policy wins. He ended the border crisis. He helped Israel destroy Iran’s most dangerous nuclear sites and then brought that war to a swift close. He brought about a cease-fire in Gaza and got the U.N. Security Council to bless his peace plan. He’s forced our NATO allies to finally start paying more for their own defense. These are genuine achievements, brought about in part because he thinks and acts and speaks like no president before him did. Would you give him credit for any of this?
Frank: For sure — and, in fact, I’d noticed what happened with the Security Council and marveled at the flare of something good amid all the Trump-administration evil. That’s the cognitive dissonance of this presidency and this president, who is spectacularly wrong for the office but still gets some things right. I think Democrats would be wise to acknowledge that more often. Doing so wouldn’t launder Trump, who’s soiled beyond all laundering. But it would project maturity and calm to an electorate that craves that.
Bret: I think you’ve put your finger on the essential challenge facing Democrats: They have to treat an abnormal president as if he were a normal one — not to lose sight of his abnormalities, but to keep from losing their own minds and judgment in the bargain. Whoever the political Einsteins were who persuaded the Democrats to shut down the government? Stop listening to them. Americans want Democrats to propose new and superior solutions to common problems, not just throw themselves at the barricades in stupid and futile gestures in the name of saving democracy.
Frank: Speaking of democracy and what will and won’t save it, you’re here with me in Chapel Hill because you just appeared at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina, for a discussion about civil discourse with our former Times Opinion colleague Elizabeth Bruenig, who now writes for The Atlantic. That’s a topic and a challenge — how to talk across ideological divides, how to have productive and respectful disagreement — that we also pay enormous attention to at Duke, where I teach. What have you concluded are some of the keys to making progress on that front?
Bret: Frank, you ignorant slut.
Frank: Quiet, piggy!
Bret: Well, that was the perfect illustration of what not to do. My suggestion to the audience was that universities have to turn themselves into countercultural agents. Meaning, in an age in which social-media algorithms and political polarization drive people into silos of ideological and cultural identity, universities have to develop more mechanisms to force them into communities of engagement. And in an era in which we are prone to scream past each other, universities have to get people to listen to one another — not for the sake of agreement, but for the purposes of understanding and truth-seeking. More easily said than done, but where else can this happen except on campus?
Is that what you’re finding at Duke?
Frank: I’m finding that students are more curious about ideological diversity and receptive to conversations with people whose views differ from theirs than the popular caricature of campus life today suggests. We adults just have to encourage that — and we have to model it, too. I’ve been staging events and convening student discussion groups at Duke along these lines. And they’ve given me hope. Speaking of which, Bret, what have you read lately that made you feel hopeful or that just gave you joy?
Bret: Being a sentimentalist, Frank, as well as a childhood numismat, I was tickled by Caity Weaver’s recent meditation in The Atlantic on America’s approximately 300 billion pennies, which the U.S. Mint has finally decided to stop coining, not least because it costs three cents to produce a one-cent coin. Turns out, there’s a moral in this story. “Everyone directly involved in making billions of pennies every year knew that it was pointless to do so,” Weaver wrote, “and also thought that it was legally impossible to stop.”
I bet we can think of other examples of pointless yet legally unstoppable parts of American life — and start thinking of ways to make them stop.
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