If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. Trump doesn’t have ideals. Just enemies.
We define most presidents by their biggest moments: the agonizing judgment calls, the signature legislation, speeches that shape public sentiment, treaties that reshape the world. But it’s the little gestures that tell the truth of President Trump, like the middle finger that he raised to a heckler during his tour of a Ford factory in Dearborn, Mich., last week. That one flipped bird showed so many of Trump’s feathers. For starters, it captured the consistent triumph of his pettiness and puerility over any bearing that fits the old definitions of “presidential.” Trump doesn’t even try for dignity. He has his tantrums in public, and his sycophants peddle those outbursts as authenticity or even boldness; in their telling, he has the confidence and honesty to eschew phony courtesies and be true to his emotions — no mask, no manners. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, responded to Trump’s Michigan meltdown by more or less praising it. He released a statement that said that a “lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the president gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.” Unambiguous? For sure. Appropriate? Only if you believe in answering ugliness with more ugliness, bile with bile, and only if your conception of leadership is acting no better than anybody else but indulging your snits and staging your fits from a higher pedestal, with a louder megaphone. Only if you believe the antonym of — and antidote to — elitism is vulgarity. That’s what Trump and so many of his abettors seem to think. Or, rather, it’s how they rationalize behaving however they like. The footage of what happened in Dearborn is crude, but apparently one of the men whom Trump passed while walking through the factory shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Trump reacted not only by gesturing obscenely but also by mouthing something at the man. You needn’t be much of a lip reader to make it out. It’s just two words. Two syllables. The first seems to begin with the letter F. The F-bomb is Trump’s idea of muscular vocabulary. It’s part of the acronym that accompanied an image that the White House circulated after the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro. Trump, looking suspiciously young and slim, strides toward the camera; below his knees, it says, “FAFO.” If you’re unfamiliar with that threat, the first letter stands for a verb that rhymes with muck, the second is for “around,” and the final two are for “find out.” Add a missing “and” in the middle, and you have Trump’s message to the world — not a summons to freedom but a command to obey. Trump’s middle finger is the exclamation point punctuating his inability to tolerate any dissent, receive any criticism, shrug off any insult. Coupled with that defensiveness is an insatiable need for affirmation and adulation. He complained so publicly and frequently about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize that its most recent recipient, María Corina Machado, presented him with hers during a visit to the White House on Thursday. There, there, Mr. President. Stop your sobbing. You can share mine! Nobel officials saw that ridiculousness coming and felt compelled to speak up and clarify that Machado didn’t have the authority to pay the medal forward or split it in two. But that didn’t end Trump’s pouting, nor did it shame him into politely declining Machado’s munificence. He posed for a picture with her that commemorated her theatrical but meaningless transfer of the honor. How utterly mortifying. How quintessentially Trump. I’ve read that he doesn’t actually type his splenetic social media posts, but if he did, it would clearly be with his middle finger only. He rants at and curses his opponents, even on the holidays. His 2023 Christmas musings included these tidings for the “SICK thugs” who accused him of wrongdoing: “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.” He channeled the same generous spirit last month. “Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country,” he wrote. Grab some eggnog and a loved one. The president has holiday-season reflections for you. Many of his predecessors at least performed a pantomime of concern for the Americans who hadn’t voted for them. Those presidents claimed to understand that they represented the whole of the country and owed everyone a measure of respect. They issued pleas for unity and spoke of common ground. Empty words, perhaps, but important nonetheless — they recognized an ideal. Trump rejects it. “I hate my opponent,” he said in September at a memorial for Charlie Kirk. A month later, in response to the nationwide No Kings demonstrations, he posted an A.I.-generated video in which he wore a crown, piloted a fighter jet with the words “King Trump” emblazoned on it, flew over American cities and dumped rivers of feces on the protesters below. He’s a scatological spin on Marie Antoinette. Let them eat excrement. And since the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, he has done nothing to acknowledge so many Americans’ horror over what happened, to persuade them that he’ll get to the truth of the matter, to calm the unrest. He has chided those critics for disobedience, cast them as enemies of the state and threatened to use ever more force to subdue them. He can’t extend his right hand in fellowship. One of the fingers on it is otherwise occupied. 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 Cascadia Daily News, Ron Judd puzzled over his ever-changing sleep score on his fancy fitness watch, which recently ranged from 27 to 72: “That’s on a 1-to-100 scale (with 100 being Rip Van Winkle and 1 being, I imagine, an ant colony living in a bag of cocaine).” (Thanks to Micki Jackson of Bellingham, Wash., for nominating this.) In GQ, Andy Cush paid tribute to the Grateful Dead musician Bob Weir, who died this month, by deconstructing the song “Playing in the Band,” which Weir co-wrote: “The melody arcs inquisitively upward, then drifts down, then up once more, then finally tumbles to the bottom of the scale. But it never settles there.” Cush added: “The image it gives me is of a leaf falling infinitely from its branch. Just as you think it might finally touch down, it catches an updraft and begins its graceful and lackadaisical descent anew.” (Dick Chady, Chapel Hill, N.C.) In The Times, Taffy Brodesser-Akner articulated her awareness, at the age of 50, that it “becomes rarer and rarer to be struck in the heart by something that consumes you, and one day you forget that it used to happen at all.” She explained: “I am in the gloaming of all that — in the perimenopause of all my passions, a time when I still remember what it is to want, but from the shoreline.” (Barbara Sloan, Conway, S.C., and Ken Hardin, Grass Valley, Calif.) Also in The Times, Carlos Lozada scoffed at the grand but vague promises that Trump has made about what will happen in the aftermath of Maduro’s ouster: “Venezuela, welcome to Infrastructure Week. Hope it works out better for you.” (Tim McFadden, Encinitas, Calif.) And Michelle Goldberg distilled the lesson of the Trump administration’s instant defense of Good’s killing and immediate vilification of her: “All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.” (Reed Scherer, DeKalb, Ill., and Margot Sims, Kansas City, Mo., among others) In her newsletter, Mary Geddry reflected on the Trump administration’s withdrawal from more than 50 international organizations and treaties: “That’s not trimming bureaucracy. That’s ripping out the load-bearing walls of global cooperation.” (Stan Shatenstein, Montreal) In The Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman contemplated Trump’s disdain for — and flouting of — the law: “Numerous federal judges have ruled against Trump, but they are in the position of trying to put out a house fire with bottles of San Pellegrino.” (Gavriella Epstein-Lightman, London) In The Atlantic, David Frum presented a theory for why Vice President JD Vance’s public statements are so particularly vile: “Because there’s always such a strong whiff of cynical calculation and inauthenticity about Vance, he has to say more and go further than many natural MAGA personalities do. He has to pay moral cash where others might be trusted on moral credit.” (Todd Wright, Edmond, Okla.) In The Nation, David Faris marveled at the meekness of congressional Republicans as the president’s popularity tanks and a midterm rebuke looms: “This is Trump’s ship, and they have retired to their quarters hoping that their morally depraved captain has some kind of plan for the ankle-deep water sloshing around their feet other than letting them drown.” (Laurie Kasparian, Mission Viejo, Calif.) In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi questioned the idea that the performer Nicki Minaj’s pro-MAGA metamorphosis was a bad career move: “She may have lost some fans, but give it a few months and she’ll be the new head of the F.B.I., president of Venezuela or queen of Greenland.” (Julie Fouhy, Brookline, Mass.) In Bloomberg, Mark Gongloff reported that bankers who are securing loans for clean-energy projects are careful not to say too much about that: “God forbid. These days, openly caring about a livable environment is almost as embarrassing as an S.T.D. or the New York Jets.” (James Brockardt, Pennington, N.J.) And in The Baltimore Banner, Leslie Gray Streeter expressed doubts about the anchor Tony Dokoupil and the retooled “CBS Evening News,” “a program that creates puff pieces saluting current politicians and promises to favor the opinions of an audience beset with misinformation over those in the know. I’m rooting for the guy. But I don’t know how much longer I can hold these pompoms.” (Jerri Kamicker, Annapolis, Md.) 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 Reading, Writing, Listening to and Recommending
On a Personal Note
I wonder whether listening “counts” as reading. I wonder whether I retain information the same way I would if it entered my brain through my eyeballs. I wonder whether I’m lazy, whether audiobooks are the boneless chicken wings of the book world — satisfying, convenient and not quite the real deal. That wondering comes from an excellent recent essay in The Times by my colleague and friend Elisabeth Egan, who described her conversion to and affinity for audiobooks. I always look for her byline and savor her work. But this article was special to me, because my own embrace of audiobooks about eight years ago felt less like a choice than like a necessity — like an insurance policy, to be exact — and even now, listening to a new mystery or an old classic is infused with emotions in addition to those that the author and narrator intended. The experience is an emblem of adaptation, a badge of resilience. For a long time, I couldn’t do audiobooks. Scratch that: I thought I couldn’t. Whenever I tried, my attention would wander from the spoken words. I’d quickly lose the thread. Wait, wait, why is this woman racing down the street, where did she get that gun, and whose body did she just trip over? I was clueless. It seemed hopeless. Back to physical books I retreated. Then circumstances changed. As I recounted in a past column and in a subsequent memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk,” I had a kind of stroke in late 2017 that ravaged the optic nerve behind my right eye and degraded my vision. I was suddenly a much slower reader, and my diagnosis came with the warning of a 20 percent chance that my left optic nerve would someday frazzle, potentially leaving me blind. I had new motivation to make audiobooks work. And so I did — with concentration, determination, patience. How I love them now, for reasons my buddy Liz articulates so well in her essay plus another: My ease with them — I now listen to some books on 1.8 speed — reminds me that many of us are cognitively enterprising and neurologically nimble in ways we don’t realize until we’re compelled to. That reassurance is a gift. So are technological advances that have meant not only an abundance of audiobooks in accessible and affordable formats but also electronic books whose font sizes and lighting levels I can control, compensating for my disability. The curses of the digital age are coupled with blessings galore. We lose; we gain. We falter; we right ourselves. The shape of our endeavors changes; the essence of them remains. I prefer my chicken wings with bones, but I’ll gratefully take them without. That’s partly because I’m a glutton, but it’s also because I appreciate the multiplicity of paths to the sustenance we need. 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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