If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. A fading president obsesses over leaving a mark
No matter what you think about the wisdom of the operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro, it was logistically audacious and technically impressive, an emphatic demonstration of American military prowess. It was President Trump flexing more than he has ever flexed before. But when, later that morning, he stood before television cameras at Mar-a-Lago to take his victory lap, it was more a victory wobble. He looked spent. He spoke in a mumbling, meandering fashion. He wasn’t President George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit in 2003 to deliver a speech prematurely declaring America’s interventions in Iraq a success; he was the same old Trump in the same old duds droning on in the same old way, only he sounded older. Granted, the 79-year-old president had been up all night or almost all night, a fact evident in part because he took a 4:30 a.m. call on his mobile phone from my Times colleague Tyler Pager. Anyone in Trump’s dress shoes would be exhausted. But his bearing and his cadence suggested something more than a mere sleep deficit, as did his inability to sound triumphant as he claimed another triumph, to flash much color as he peacocked. At a moment like that, you’d expect there to be enough adrenaline pumping through him for a pumped-up performance. Instead he delivered a wound-down one. It illustrated a potentially dangerous collision of dynamics that’s one of my great concerns about the span of time between now and the November midterms — which, as Trump well knows, could bring a comeuppance and then restraints that he doesn’t currently face. Will diminished vigor and a ticking clock yield expanded ambitions and compensatory displays of strength? Will his hunger — for more ostensible victories, for more recognition, for just plain more — intensify along with the prospect of political enfeeblement? I watch and listen to him and get the sense of a man stuffing himself at the buffet before it’s taken away. A man bellowing, or trying to bellow, about his superiority as his voice weakens. “Dominance,” “dominance,” “dominance” — he returned repeatedly to that word during his Mar-a-Lago news conference, a tic that was just as much a tell. Also telling was the show he staged for Pager and three other Times reporters — Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Rogers and David E. Sanger — on Wednesday evening, when he welcomed them into the Oval Office for a two-hour interview whose duration was part of its point, as Trump himself made clear. “Two hours,” he said to the reporters as the interview concluded. “I could go nine hours.” With the reporters present, he took a phone call from Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia. The call’s contents were off the record, but its length — “the better part of an hour,” as the reporters described it — was something Trump seemed to want noted. He asked them, “Do you think Biden could do that?” Rogers wrote that Trump sought to “present himself as indefatigable, projecting stamina and energy for a news organization he has accused of seditious behavior for reporting about his health and age.” And Trump said unabashedly that the only limits to his power were his “own morality.” Which, to my ears, means no limits at all. I’ve never observed in Trump anything approaching a conventional moral code, a set of ethical bearings that circumscribe his conduct. I’ve beheld gripes, grudges, whims and wants — so very, very many wants. For months now, he has been acting with a rapacity remarkable even for someone so famously given to greed. He’s creating an ostentatious White House ballroom in a new East Wing as tall as the main White House building. He’s attempting to stamp his visage on both sides of a $1 coin to commemorate the country’s 250th birthday. He’s constructing a whole new monument — a gaudy arch — for the occasion, too. He announced the building of a “golden fleet” of “Trump class” warships. He put his name on the Kennedy Center and on the U.S. Institute of Peace. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you,” he reportedly said during his first term in the presidency. In this second term, he’s in “don’t you dare forget me” mode, and the infinity of directions in which that impulse could sprawl is terrifying. Could it spread to Greenland? That’s a buffet item he’s eyeing. To Canada? He has salivated over it. He’s lavish with threats. He’s brimming with need. He wants more affirmation. He bristles when it’s not immediately forthcoming. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,” Trump told Republican members of the House at a party gathering last week, alluding to polls that portray an unhappy, restive electorate. “Because we have — we have the right policy.” Those pesky voters! So unappreciative. Trump warned the lawmakers that they’ve “got to win the midterms” because if they don’t, “I’ll get impeached.” That’s the statement of a man who is keenly aware of his power’s mortality — and who seems to be combating and quelling his anxiety by taking an ever more extravagant power trip. Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday. For the Love of Sentences
In The Contrarian, Brian O’Neill defended his fondness for “and yet” between or in the middle of sentences recognizing Trump’s inconsistencies and incoherence: “I have tried substitutes. ‘Even so.’ ‘Still.’ ‘Meanwhile, back on Earth.’ They all have their charms, but none of them quite work. ‘And yet’ has the right snap. It is a two-word seatbelt. It keeps the paragraph from flying through the windshield when the story hits the inevitable contradiction.” (Thanks to Karen R. Martin of Davidson, N.C., for nominating this.) In her newsletter, The New Unhinged, Mariah Faith Continelli analyzed our atomization: “Millions are quietly leaving religion, politics, careers, ideologies, but nobody wants to talk about the fact that we’re now spiritually homeless, wandering Costco aisles with no map, dissociating by the rotisserie chickens.” (Paul Behrman, Frankfort, Ill.) In The Atlantic, Jake Lundberg worshiped at the church of Costco: “There’s a small gasp upon entry — the kind of quiet awe that one feels before the most epic human achievements, as when stepping across the threshold of St. Peter’s or the Chartres Cathedral. But in this place, there is no baroque majesty, no stained glass, just abundance bathed in light. In the sweep of human history generally marked by scarcity and want, here is bounty on an unimaginable scale; here is a year’s supply of mozzarella sticks; here is a hot dog and a drink for $1.50; here is a monument of our civilization, in more than 600 locations across the United States.” (Elisa F. Stanford, Monument, Colo., and Steve Svartz, McLean, Va.) In The New Yorker, Ian Parker illuminated essential character traits in such senior presidential advisers as Peter Navarro: “Long-term service to Trump requires both egomania and its opposite: self-annihilation. The man whom Navarro likes to call the Boss seems to value insincere, or bought, obeisance — the flapping and fussing of a maître d’ — more than heartfelt fandom, which lacks the piquancy of humiliation.” (Kit Wheatley, Washington, and Robert Dowd, Tacoma, Wash., among others) Also in The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells considered a riot of reflections on the military operation in Venezuela: “Key administration personalities have taken to network television and social media, offering their own post-facto theories of the case. They have been like the sweepers in curling, trying to coax a runaway stone onto an advantageous track.” (Maxwell Burke, Seattle, and Barbara Douglas, Manhattan) In The Times, Tom Friedman questioned the Trump administration’s apparent absence of planning for Venezuela after the military operation that seized Maduro: “Grab-and-go is great if you are doing lunch, but as a geopolitical strategy it has its limits.” (Andrew Verner, Eugene, Ore., and Ann McCracken, Alexandria, Va., among many others) Also in The Times, Matthew Walther took the measure of a MAGA-fied Republican Party bereft of such gatekeepers as William F. Buckley Jr.: “Informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.” (Michael Arnis, Olympia, Wash.) Sam Anderson pondered the arc and adorability of Noah Wyle, who was the “youngest of the core cast members” on the classic medical drama “ER”: “His face looked as if two babyfaces got together and had a baby babyface.” And now, at 54, as the star of “The Pitt,” another medical drama? “Wyle appears to be aging into previously unexplored zones of handsomeness,” Anderson wrote. “The creases branching from the corners of his eyes feel artisanal.” (Catherine Feiler, Pittsburgh, and Anne Childs, West Bath, Me., among many others) Anderson’s article overflowed with memorable lines, including this description of the character in “The Pitt” played by Katherine LaNasa — who, like Wyle, won an Emmy for her performance in the show — as “a no-nonsense control tower of glamorous sass whose authority seems to flow directly from the center of the earth.” (Cary Williams, Chevy Chase, Md.) In The Washington Post, Chuck Culpepper saluted those who follow and love the Indiana University football team, which, after many decades of mediocrity, suddenly shot to glory: “They’re quite possibly the happiest fans anyone ever saw — steeped in amazement while still free of the poison of expectation.” (Joe Bellavance, Indianapolis) And in The Wall Street Journal, after Indiana walloped Alabama in the Rose Bowl, Jason Gay admitted: “I’ve given up trying to understand this Indiana turnaround. We’ve crossed the river from Cinderella to Whathehella.” (Bruce Newman, Santa Clara, Calif.) 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
On a Personal (by Which I Mean Regan) Note
I know that dogs process the world first and foremost through their noses, and that Regan’s morning sniffing is like my morning reading. She’s catching up on things. And I’m sure that the forest trails that she and I walk have updates, bulletins and minor mysteries to rival the ones that populate my inbox at the beginning of each day. Still I’m not fooled by her frequent pauses as I try to move the two of us forward and raise our heart rates just a little. I’m not duped by the 30 seconds or 60 seconds or minute and a half that she devotes to an olfactory assessment of an ordinary clump of leaves or unremarkable tangle of vines. She’s cadging little rests under the guise of little investigations. You’ve heard of a head fake? This is a nose fake. And I’m on to her because she never stopped so often in the past, because she’ll be 12 in about three weeks and because those two facts can’t be unrelated. Also, Regan’s smell-a-thons coincide with her herky-jerky odysseys up staircases that she once ascended in a balletic jiff. Both are adjustments for aging. I’m not happy about them. They’re portents, and I hate seeing her struggle. But my challenge with her is much the same as my challenge with my 61-year-old self: I can be sad and angry about time’s toll or I can accept its inevitability. I can rue what has been lost or I can work with what remains. On most of our walks, her tail wags as reliably as ever. I have an audiobook streaming through my earbuds. Sunlight dapples the creek. A breeze tickles the trees just ahead. Does it matter whether Regan and I stride quickly or mosey erratically toward them? Or just that we’re still in motion, still together, still here? Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.
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