Andrew Ferguson | The Atlantic

Nixon Between the Lines

2023-09-19T07:00:00-04:00

Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I was beavering away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles, when Henry Kissinger twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.

Kissinger, the last surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, was in Yorba Linda last fall for two reasons: to speak at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote a book he had published earlier in the year, at the improbable age of 99. The book, Leadership, contains an entire chapter in praise of Nixon, the man who had made Kissinger the 20th century’s only celebrity diplomat.

I was there to gather material for a Nixon book of my own. I had been nosing around in a cache of volumes from Nixon’s personal library. I was particularly interested in any marks he may have left in the books he’d owned. From what I could tell, no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind. To give an idea: One heavily underlined book in the collection is a lengthy biography of Tolstoy; another is a book on statesmanship by Charles de Gaulle; another is a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art. Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading.

Every morning a friendly factotum would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon Kissinger arrived, I had worked my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon left the White House. A significant portion of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News named Russ Braley, is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. In Braley’s telling, the Times’ treatment swung between the unfair and the uncomprehending, for reasons ranging from negligence to malice.

The book had found its ideal reader in Richard Nixon. The pages of his copy were cluttered with underlining from his thick ballpoint pen. It occurred to me, as I followed along, that Nixon was being brought up short by his reading: Much of the material in Bad News was apparently news to him.

[From the May 1982 issue: Kissinger and Nixon in the White House]

My reading was interrupted by a commotion outside the research room. I stuck my head out in time to see Kissinger and his entourage settling into the room across the hall. A group of donors and Nixonophiles had gathered to hear heroic tales of Nixon’s statecraft.

I dutifully returned to Braley. When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”

Page 551 from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by Russ Braley (Photograph by Joel Barhamand for The Atlantic)

Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.

The contrast between Nixon’s bitter hash marks about Kissinger from the 1980s and Kissinger’s present-day celebration of his old boss offered a lesson in the evolving calculation of self-interest. It also conjured the image of a solitary old man in semiretirement, learning things about a now-vanished world he’d once thought he presided over. It happened often in the reading room in Yorba Linda: With unexpected immediacy, the gray metal cart carried the past into the present, in small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.

The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people’s libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of “textual activity,” to use the scholar’s clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.

A book invites various kinds of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (whom Nixon admired, to judge by his extravagant underlining in the Durants’ The Age of Voltaire) scribbled commentary so incessantly that his marginalia have been published in volumes of their own. Voltaire liked to argue with a book. Nixon did not. He had a lively mind but not, when reading, a disputatious one; he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).

[From the April 1973 issue: The president and the press]

In his method, Nixon resembled the English writer Paul Johnson. I once asked Johnson how, given his prolific journalistic career—several columns and reviews a week in British and American publications—he managed to read all the books he cited in his own very long and very readable histories, which embraced such expansive subjects as Christianity, ancient Egypt, and the British empire. His reaction bordered on revulsion at my naivete. “Read them?!” he spat out. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” As it happens, Nixon was an avid reader of Johnson, whose books he often handed out to friends and staff at Christmastime.

John Adams, another busy producer of marginalia, liked to quote a Latin epigram: Studium sine calamo somnium. Adams translated this as: “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon acquired the pen-in-hand habit early, as his surviving college and high-school textbooks show, and he kept at it throughout his life. For Nixon, as for the rest of us, marking up books was also a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read. He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.

One of the most heavily represented authors in Nixon’s personal library is Churchill, whom Nixon revered not only as a statesman but also as a historian and an essayist. Nixon’s shelves sagged with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies: The World Crisis, Marlborough: His Life and Times, The Second World War, A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a series of sketches he wrote in the 1920s and ’30s sizing up roughly two dozen friends and colleagues, was clearly a favorite. When I retrieved Nixon’s copy from a box, I found it dog-eared throughout.

Nixon’s tastes ran heavily toward history, but he could be tempted away from the past to a book of present-day punditry, if the writer and point of view were agreeable. According to a report in Time magazine, when half a million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, Nixon holed up in his private quarters with a book called The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today. The book, slim and elegant, had been sent to Nixon by its author, the historian Daniel Boorstin.

Judging by his notations, Nixon was interested less in Boorstin’s turgid cultural analysis of “consumption communities” and more in his thesis that the ragged protesters gathering outside the White House fence constituted something new in American history: They were not radicals at all but nihilists. Nixon brought out the pen, and in Yorba Linda, a continent and decades away from his White House hideaway, I could still feel the insistent furrow of his underlining on the page. He marked several consecutive paragraphs in a section called “The New Barbarians,” in which Boorstin criticized protesters for their “indolence of mind” and “mindless, obsessive quest for power.”

People read books for lots of reasons: instruction, pleasure, uplift. This was Nixon reading for self-defense.

The book I most wanted to see in Yorba Linda was Nixon’s copy of Robert Blake’s biography Disraeli (1966). A re-creation of Nixon’s favorite room in the White House was one of the Nixon museum’s prime exhibits when it opened, in 1990, a few years before Nixon’s death. (It has since been redesigned.) Nixon himself chose Disraeli to rest on his desk for the public to see. The book was given to him during his first year in the White House, in 1969, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor, prominent Democrat, and future U.S. senator from New York. To the surprise of just about everybody, the year he took office, Nixon made Moynihan his chief domestic-policy counselor, a counterpart in those early days to Kissinger as head of the National Security Council. Despite Nixon’s enduring image as a black-eyed right-winger, his political ideology was always flexible, if not flatly self-contradictory.

[From the November 1974 issue: The friends of Richard Nixon]

Moynihan the liberal hoped to persuade Nixon the hybrid to take Benjamin Disraeli, the great prime minister of Victorian Britain, as his model. Disraeli was a Tory and an imperialist, and at the same time a social reformer of vision and courage. According to Moynihan, Nixon read the book within days of receiving it. Soon enough, the president was calling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” The precise meaning of the tag was clear to Nixon alone, but we can assume it underwent a great deal of improvisation and revision as his presidency wore on.

Disraeli’s appeal to Nixon went beyond his light-footed ideology. Speaking to his Cabinet at a dinner one evening in early 1972, Nixon called Disraeli a “magnificent” politician. Now, he went on, the “fashionable set today would immediately say, ‘Ah, politicians. Bad.’ ” As he saw it, the “fashionable set”—the epithet, suffused with reverse snobbery and class resentment, is pure Nixon—believed that politicians disdain idealism and think nothing of principle. “But,” Nixon said, “the pages of history are full of idealists who never accomplished anything.” It was “pragmatic men” like Disraeli “who had the ability to do things that other people only talked about.” Nixon, who had never shied away from calling himself a politician, wanted to see himself in Disraeli, or at least in Blake’s Disraeli—this “classic biography,” to which, he told his Cabinet, he often turned for inspiration on sleepless nights. And here the book was, Nixon’s own copy, at the top of my growing stack in Yorba Linda.

Disraeli is packed with observations about political tradecraft. They are penetrating, specific, and cold-blooded. The little dicta come from both the biographer and his subject. “He was a master at disguising retreat as advance,” Blake wrote approvingly. Nixon underlined that sentence, and then this one from Disraeli’s contemporary Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.”

A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?” But it was politics that always caught his eye, and activated his pen. Disraeli, Blake wrote, “suffered from a defect, endemic among politicians, the greatest reluctance to admit publicly that he had been in the wrong, even when the fault lay with his subordinates.” Another from Blake: Successful politicians “realize that a large part of political life in a parliamentary democracy consists not so much in doing things yourself as in imparting the right tone to things that others do for you or to things that are going to happen anyway.”

Should we take marked passages like these, with their ironic acceptance of the fudging and misdirection called for in the political arts, as a gesture toward self-criticism on Nixon’s part? Probably not: Nixon knew himself better than psycho-biographers give him credit for, but self-awareness is not self-criticism. In his chosen profession, he took the bad with the good, and his casual, creeping concessions to the seamier requirements of politics are what eventually did him in.

[From the October 2017 issue: How the Vietnam War broke the American presidency]

If you go looking for them, you can see reflections of Blake’s Disraeli throughout Nixon’s presidency, encapsulated in enduring phrases here and there. It was in Blake that Nixon came across Disraeli’s famous description of “exhausted volcanoes.” Disraeli coined it to disparage the feckless time-servers in William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet after they had been in office a few years. Nixon underscored not only “exhausted volcanoes” but the rest of the passage from Blake’s text: The phrase, Blake writes, “was no mere gibe … For the past year, the Government had been vexed by that combination of accidents, scandals and blunders which so often for no apparent reason seem to beset an energetic administration in its later stages.”

Nixon feared the same fate for his second term—a loss of energy and direction. The day after his landslide reelection, in 1972, he called together his Cabinet and senior staff. He told them of Disraeli’s warning about “exhausted volcanoes.” And then, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, serving as the lord high executioner, he demanded their resignations en masse.

Not everything in Blake’s Disraeli caught Nixon’s interest; certainly not everything was useful to him. As I paged through, I saw there were many longueurs, stretches of several dozen pages, sometimes more, where no filleting of any kind happened. And then—inevitably, suddenly—Nixon the reader is seized by passages of sometimes thunderous resonance, and the pen is again called into play.

“Disraeli,” Blake writes, “really was regarded as an outsider by the Victorian governing class.” One can almost see Nixon sit bolt upright and pick up his pen. This is the same ostracism that Nixon himself felt keenly throughout his personal and professional life, in fact and in imagination. The following page and a half, discussing the disdain of the “élite” for Disraeli, is bracketed nearly in its entirety. Some sentences are boxed. Some passages, like this one, are underlined as well as bracketed:

Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy … inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.

The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”

When reading about the elites, Nixon pressed the ballpoint deep into the page. We marginalia mavens, tracing our fingers across the lines today, can only guess, of course. But it may be that in 1969, sitting in the reading chair in his White House hideaway, he already sensed that this was not bound to end well.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Nixon Between the Lines.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

I Know What Makes Conventions So Maddening

2020-08-29T07:00:00-04:00

Having been to many political conventions over the years and watched many more slumped on the sofa bed in my home bunker, and now having watched two mostly remote events courtesy of Republicans and Democrats, I have finally isolated the element that has historically made these occasions so maddening and unpleasant: people.

Specifically, I have in mind the people who go to political conventions. Every four years, their unquenchable ardor for partisan expression leads them to pack up their air horns and vuvuzelas and drive or fly to an uninteresting hotel in some faraway city so that they might jump up and down on cue in a packed sports arena. The attitude of a journalist to such people is supposed to range from mild amusement (“Wherever did you find a muumuu with Richard Nixon’s face on the bosom?”) to forensic curiosity (“Which way do you think the Huguenots in your county will swing in the off-year primary?”).

In truth, convention-goers serve mostly to prolong what is already insufferably tedious. They do this through wild, frequent, indiscriminate applause; through random, often indistinct chanting; through a mulish refusal to follow the protocols of crowd control; and through endless, visitors-bureau boosterism during roll-call votes. No, New Mexico. You are not the “Land of Enchantment.” I’ve lived in Albuquerque.

[Read: A carnival of disinformation]

This small revelation burst upon me as I watched the last two nights of the Republican National Convention. Like the Democratic convention the week before, the RNC was a slickly produced affair, free of techno-glitches. The speeches in both were competently written and for the most part well delivered. The “human interest” stories were both interesting and human, as they should be, if undeniably and inevitably manipulative. But as one vignette passed into another, what I found myself enjoying most of all were the transitions between them. They were seamless. They were blessedly silent.

The silence had many positive effects. For one, it helped keep things moving along at a steady clip, uninhibited by delegates ventilating their need to show their delight and approval. More important, it allowed listeners to absorb what they’d just heard. The knife edge of Nikki Haley’s much-contested assertion—“This is not a racist country”—would have been blunted, for good or bad, if delegates had been there to receive it as an applause line, as surely they would have done. One shudders to imagine the cheapening effect of traditional whoops and hollers on the almost unbearable testimony of Ann Dorn, the widow of the retired cop who was killed defending a friend’s store during the riots in St. Louis.

At the same time, those whoops and hollers rising from the convention floor might have obscured, even normalized, the bizarre, shouty performance of GOP Week’s It Couple, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the latter of whom seemed to be doing an impression of Danny Kaye lip-synching an aria by Patti LuPone. Don Jr.’s high-decibel speech was taken by pundits as evidence that he is embarking on a political career of his own, with an emphasis on barking.

And then Melania Trump showed up, and so did an in-person audience. She appeared in the Rose Garden Wednesday night to deliver a speech to a crowd in the traditional manner. If we leave aside the grotesque deformation of the executive mansion into a campaign venue, her speech was good enough. It was also 35 percent too long. This defect I insist on putting down to the presence of real human beings arrayed before her. In the minds of some performers, an audience is an invitation not to discipline and self-control but to self-indulgence. A still better example than the first lady’s speech was that of Ivanka Trump the next night. Hers was even more indulgent, even less necessary. Ivanka is a fan of yoga, which keeps her limber enough to pat herself on the back. At moments, she displayed the grasping intensity of a speaker who might never surrender the mic, like a dark horse who’s won a surprise Oscar for best supporting actor and knows this is her one and only chance to give a speech in front of Brad Pitt.

[David Frum: Trump is a secessionist from the top]

Self-congratulation and self-indulgence are twin characteristics of the Trump presidency, and both were well received by the partisans who crowded the South Lawn when Trump took the stage Thursday night. Joe Biden is no less a fan of Joe Biden than Donald Trump is of Donald Trump, and he is, if anything, even windier. Yet Biden’s speech accepting his party’s nomination was a third the length of Trump’s speech accepting his. In his nearly empty convention center, with the nearest funny hats and noisemakers attached to his fans in the parking lot outside, Biden looked lonesome and bereft, conditions that moved him to an economy of words he has never before shown. The speech was undistinguished, but it was the most welcome performance of his career.

Not so with Trump. The presence of a worshipful crowd encouraged him often to depart from his well-written text and sow it with his pointless asides and incidental self-commentary. The audience was indiscriminate in its appreciation, as political-convention audiences always are. Trump had only to pause for breath to cue the cheers and applause. The crowd was too small, and the venue (despite the best efforts of the RNC’s gaudy set designers) was too dignified, to rise to the kind of pressurized mania that traditional conventions achieve at their best. Thursday night at the RNC was neither one thing nor the other. The obligatory cheers had the effect of simultaneously lengthening the speech and draining it of whatever rhetorical meaning it might have had. Thanks to the crowd, the climax of the Republican convention was also its low point. The fireworks were pretty terrific, though.

The noun convention comes from the verb to convene—I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know—and if there aren’t delegates convening, you’re not going to have much that can qualify for the noun. I will stipulate to that. And I don’t pretend that the success of these mostly crowdless pandemic conventions will have any lasting effects; the human and institutional needs satisfied by the traditional convention are too enduring to ignore. But what we’ve seen the past two weeks was perfectly adequate for us outsiders, for the bulk of ordinary voters—indeed, a marked improvement over the usual convention as a means of showcasing the tendencies and policies the parties want us to think they embody. In 2020, COVID-19 has altered nearly every aspect of social, cultural, and political life for the worse, in many cases tragically so. We should give it credit when it gets something right.

The Convention Has Finally Become What It Always Was

2020-08-18T09:14:00-04:00

Watching the first session of the world’s first live-streamed political convention last night, my mind kept returning to the late American historian Daniel Boorstin, and then to the equally late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. (My mind has a broom closet where it keeps mid-20th-century public intellectuals.) Almost 60 years have passed since Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event, and nearly as long since McLuhan popped out with his own coinage, “The medium is the message.” Both phrases grew shopworn in the ensuing decades, but as the Democrats may show with their experiment in virtual conventioneering, some clichés endure because of their resiliency and usefulness.

Any modern political convention is a pseudo-event. Boorstin coined the word to describe an artificial happening—a press conference, an awards ceremony—manufactured expressly for the purpose of getting the press to cover it, as though it qualified as genuine news, arising naturally from the clash of circumstance rather than the grasping imagination of PR flacks. Historically, of course, political conventions made news by the bucketful. They served several functions—preeminently, the selection from a field of candidates of a presidential nominee to represent the party in the fall election. They also featured the picking of party officials, the ratification of a party platform, the choice of a vice-presidential candidate, and other decisions that were the stuff of authentic news.

[Read: ]What happens if political conventions disappear?

Boorstin published his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, two years after the 1960 Democratic convention, the last national gathering of Democrats to open with the identity of their presidential candidate in any doubt. Following a day or two of backstage politicking, the nomination went to John F. Kennedy. Thereafter, 30 national conventions, Democratic and Republican, have commenced with nearly all of the party’s business already accomplished, including the informal designation of its presidential nominee. (The only modern exception is the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri, where Ronald Reagan made one final lunge for the nomination before Gerald Ford pocketed it.) During most presidential-election years, usually a few weeks into primary season, journalists and politicos try to rescue themselves from boredom by contemplating the possibility that their fondest dream will at last come true: a “brokered convention” complete with dark horses, front-runners, and favorite sons and daughters, competing through multiple roll-call votes until a surprise victor emerges from the rubble.

[Read: The Bush-Gore recount is an omen for 2020]

Drama! Uncertainty! Real-world events to write about! It never happens. Pseudo-events don’t work that way.

The unhappy decline of the political convention, from meaningful event to pseudo-event, is closely tied to the advent of electronic media, particularly television. As McLuhan knew, and expressed in his famous formula, the means (the medium) by which information (the message) is disseminated can alter the nature of the information. This is especially true when there’s not a lot of information to begin with. Television first featured at the conventions in a big way in 1952. That summer, broadcast networks aired the first nationwide gavel-to-gavel convention coverage, 60 hours’ worth each week. According to a definitive monograph by the scholar Zachary Karabell, an astonishing 80 percent of U.S. TV-owning households spent an average of 10 to 13 hours a week watching the conventions that year.

[Read: What Biden can learn from Sanders about the young Latino vote]

Four years later, ratings dipped—and they dipped again four years after that. Network executives worried that the conventions were not, after all, good TV. Convention planners, panicked that this bounty of free advertising would vanish, responded as time went on by trimming the proceedings to fit the shrinking attention span of television viewers. Speeches were shortened and schedules tightened. More celebrities were recruited to strut upon the stage, and podium designs bristled with colors to delight those Americans lucky enough to own a color TV. There were occasional failures in the pursuit of made-for-TV conventions, some of them spectacular; in 1972, in a symptom of the general chaos afflicting his party, the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, didn’t deliver his televised acceptance speech until 3 a.m. EST.

Such mishaps only heightened the resolve of party professionals to tailor their proceedings to television’s demands. They succeeded too well. By the early 1990s, the network programmers who had complained of windy speeches and endless longueurs were cutting their already stripped-down broadcasts on the grounds that the conventions were—can you guess?—too scripted, insufficiently surprising and spontaneous. Evidently a pseudo-event fails if it looks too much like a pseudo-event.

[Read: No, COVID-19 is not a metaphor]

It was at this point, 24 years ago, that the cable-news channels came to the rescue, providing an infinite supply of airtime and a bottomless appetite for gasbaggery. They relieved the major networks of whatever remained of their news divisions’ idealistic obligation to air party conventions as a public service. ABC, NBC, and CBS shrunk their coverage to next to nothing—usually an hour a night—while the cable channels treated the conventions less as a source of news and more as a grand quadrennial event in which journalists and politicians and activists combined into a giant, indistinguishable mass worthy of round-the-clock attention.

[Read: How Kamala Harris’ attack on Joe Biden helped her]

Indeed, in the past three or four presidential elections, it’s become a commonplace to note that the political convention has, amoebalike, split in two. The usual convention goes on as before, with roughly 4,000 delegates and party operatives pretending to do something functional. Meanwhile they are surrounded and observed by a much larger gathering of 15,000 or more journalists, using the convention as an excuse to have a convention of their own, in which work and pleasure shamelessly commingle. The second convention of journalists could never allow the first convention of pols to perish, lest it perish too, and all the fun (and work) be lost. The parasite takes care to keep the host alive, even as it consumes it, like those poor colonists hanging from the wall in Aliens.

But now even this reason for the continued existence of political conventions has been overcome. Those of us reporters who as recently as this spring thrilled to the prospect of an expense-account week in Milwaukee (with the Democrats) or Charlotte (with the Republicans) are reduced to sitting at home like everyone else. We face two hours a night of two-minute speeches and other forms of propaganda live-streaming from the nowhere of cyberspace, while our only hope of surprise lies in the prospect of a technological disaster: Max Headroom hiccups from Bill Clinton or pixilated dissolves of Gavin Newsom’s hair. For decades, political conventions adapted to every indignity that progress and technology could throw at them, surviving as a pseudo-event about a pseudo-event, a goofy and essentially unnecessary anachronism. It may take a pandemic to do them in once and for all.

Trump’s Attempt at an Un-Trumpian Image

2020-07-30T06:30:00-04:00

“I’m being nice today,” President Donald Trump said last Friday, at a ceremony to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the former congressman and Olympic athlete Jim Ryun. And Trump has been nice—nice is a very relative term in this case—at least since last week, when he unexpectedly revived the fabled tradition of regular White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic.

You probably remember those briefings from back in the day, exactly 37 years ago (quickly fact-checks), I mean, a few months ago. Recall the early sun-dappled sessions in the White House Rose Garden: The briefings were full of hope and promises, presenting the country with a vision of coast-to-coast drive-through testing sites offering real-time results; of one-stop Google web pages that would do everything for the pandemic-curious but swab their sinuses and call an Uber to the emergency room; of big corporations and big government standing arm in arm to stare down the virus and stop it in its tracks, all forming an irresistible phalanx of tech, science, capital, and fleet-footed bureaucracy. None of these promises came true, but the memory still glows pleasantly.

[ Derek Thompson: Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time ]

Everything was downhill from there, as the world knows. The news got worse, and the regular briefings were moved inside, to the claustrophobic oubliette known as the White House press briefing room. Reporters grew nasty; the president got nastier. The briefings touched bottom in late April. Evidently jazzed by an Oval Office conversation with a scientist from the Department of Homeland Security, the president took the podium and contemplated the possible effects of light and disinfectant on the virus. With the world watching in horror, he allowed his mind to drift into nightmare, which he seemed to mistake for a thought experiment.

[Peter Wehner: The President Is Unraveling]

“Supposing you brought the light into the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way,” he mused. “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

The mental image of the president wielding a colonoscopy tube ensured that the briefings would never be the same.

But now the administration has brought them back, with the president appearing solo and for the most part well scripted, and no scientific or other advisers in sight, a strategic move forced by necessity. As his poll numbers search for their own bottom, and his Democratic opponent watches from a distance as they sink, Trump has been attempting to fashion an un-Trumpian image: soft-spoken, reasonable, realistic, open to argument … nice. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

[ Read: Don’t Count Trump Out ]

The new era of briefings began with a series of concessions that would have been unthinkable earlier in the month. It’s almost as if someone handed the president his own folder labeled Things Trump Will Never Say and forced him to recite them anyway. The pandemic, he said, “will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better.” This was “something I don’t like saying about things,” he added, which isn’t true at all: The president takes undeniable relish in limning the disasters that await the country should it be swinish enough not to reelect him. No one thinks of Donald “American Carnage” Trump as President Pollyanna. What he means is he dislikes speaking negatively on matters that he is personally involved in, and predicting bad news about the virus implicates him in the bad news. This was a first.

At one briefing last week he showed a chart of “different statistics and different rates of success and, I guess you could say also, things that we can do better on.” Until that moment in the Trump presidency, the category of “things we can do better on” did not exist; ontologically, such things were akin to heffalumps and jackalopes. He acknowledged that the $600 in supplemental unemployment insurance enacted earlier this year “worked out well” even though “I was against that original decision”—an admission that veered close to saying he’d once committed an error in judgment. After threatening earlier in the month to cut off federal aid to schools that failed to provide in-class teaching this fall, he conceded that school districts “may need to delay reopening,” depending on the local advance of the virus. He even seemed to second-guess his dearest indulgence. Asked by one interviewer whether he ever regretted his tweeting, he replied, “Often. Too often.”

Most unexpected, the president has taken to carrying around a mask in his coat pocket. “Whether you like the mask or not,” he advised, “they have an impact.” He even suggested that his own vacillation on the topic of masks has been a result, as his detractors say, of following the science.

[J]ulia Marcus: The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks

“Now, we have experts that have said, in the recent past, that masks aren’t necessarily good to wear,” he said in one briefing. “But now they’ve changed their mind. If they change their mind, that’s good enough for me. So I wear it when appropriate.” At certain moments these days, he removes his mask from his pocket and waves it around like a little flag at an Independence Day parade—not as good as actually wearing it, but … progress.

It would be a stretch to describe the president’s most recent performance at the briefings and other appearances as “crisp,” and these signs of normality would, in any other public official, be, well, normal. The trademark garrulity isn’t going anywhere; as always, he can work the same dubious assertion (“the greatest economy we’ve ever had”) three or four times into a single answer. He still speaks obvious untruths (“I think the poll numbers are very good”) and engages in bizarre punditry (“When you look at Florida, as an example, you have thousands of boat out on—boats out in the ocean, out in the Intracoastal. You look at other states where, likewise, you have thousands of boats, and they’re all waving the Trump sign”). The Trump campaign must delight in knowing the yacht-owning Intracoastal Waterway vote is a lock.

The facade has deteriorated as the days have worn on. Tuesday’s briefing found the president defending his retweet of a disreputable doctor touting the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19. He then mused on the mystery of the popularity of his advisers Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, which is high, relative to his own, which is not. “They’re highly thought of, but nobody likes me,” he said. “It can only be my personality.”

Well, that and a few other things. The careening train of Trump’s thought at Tuesday’s briefing did not take him into the land of sunlight injections and bleach enemas, but for anyone susceptible to false hope, it was a reminder of the obvious. Let us acknowledge this eruption of normality in the president and even, if we dare, be reassured by it, knowing, as we do, that it will never last.

Christopher Buckley on Satire in the Age of Trump

2020-07-11T06:00:00-04:00

In 1999, when Donald Trump was first toying with the idea of giving his countrymen the honor of voting for him for president, the notion was so absurd that Christopher Buckley took to The Wall Street Journal to publish his rendition of a Trump inaugural address. “My fellow Americans,” Buckley’s Trump began, “this is a great day for me personally.”

Twenty years later, Buckley remains the master satirist of Washington life. To be sure, it’s not the most crowded or competitive professional category in the world, but he has again cemented his position at its apex with the publication of Make Russia Great Again. In his 19th book, Buckley takes on a subject that would seem beyond satire—indeed, would itself seem a manifestation of some wild, dark satiric impulse: the Trump presidency. Buckley and I talked about Trump, the book, the Republican Party, and much else in a conversation last week. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Andrew Ferguson: I guess my first question is: How did you work up the nerve? You’re satirizing a moment that seems to be unsatirizable. A couple of years ago, you said you’d stop writing satire because contemporary politics in America had become “sufficiently self-satirizing” and no longer required your help. Yet here you are, taking it on.

Christopher Buckley: I suppose the answer is desperation. I did retire the mantle of satire some years ago. Which reminds me of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, which is Washington-based. It shows a secretary approaching a congressman’s desk, around which is sitting the congressman and a number of his aides. She’s walking in holding what looks like a folded cloth in her hands. And the caption is “No, no, Miss Clark! I asked you to bring in the Mantle of Greatness, not the Cloak of Secrecy.”

So I retired the cloak of satire, and I turned to historical fiction, which I had a jolly fun time doing. I wrote two [books]: One is called The Relic Master, which is set in 1517 and the Holy Roman Empire, and the other is called The Judge Hunter, which is set in 1664 New England.

Ferguson: Both of those had satirical elements to them.

Buckley: Yeah. I was sort of pleased when one of the reviewers of The Relic Master said it was a cross between The Princess Bride and Oceans 11, which may be the first and only time those two paragons have been so yoked. They did okay, but they didn’t knock, you know, Hilary Mantel off the mantelpiece. They didn’t seem to be what my audience—to the extent I have an audience—wanted.

But people kept asking me, “Hey, you do satire, why aren’t you writing about this?” And to them, I said, why bother?

In the end, I think I tend to respond to what you might call the muse of annoyance. I finally got tired of hearing people say, “What does Putin have on Trump anyway?” And I also was continually wondering why we weren’t retaliating against Russia.Why aren’t we interfering in their elections? Although it’s pretty hard to interfere. I mean, if you put all the organs of U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence to work, they’d probably succeed in reducing Putin’s plurality from 97.6 to 94.2 percent.

So I came up with this notion that’s frankly borrowed from the greatest satire ever done, namely Dr. Strangelove. Deep in the bowels of Fort Meade, at the national-security agency, is a doomsday device, code-named Placid Reflux. When Russia interferes in one of our elections, if there’s no counteraction to that, if the United States doesn’t retaliate, this machine will assume that the president has been decapitated, and will automatically respond. And in this case, Placid Reflux elects the head of the Russian Communist Party as Russian president. So that’s the kickoff.

[Timothy Kudo: Our complacent commander in chief]

Ferguson: You do finally reveal what Vladimir Putin has on Trump. I don’t want to give the game away.

Buckley: No, no, we mustn’t deprive the many avid readers who are at this moment logging on to Amazon to purchase the book in bulk orders.

How many times have we heard this plangent cry: What does Putin have on this guy? Most recently there’s the story in The New York Times saying that Putin was offering the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. soldiers. And all we hear from our commander in chief is “This is just another hoax!” And so, once again, the plangent cry is raised: For God’s sake, what does Putin have on him?

So I decided to come up with my own thought on what it is.

Ferguson: Well, it actually kind of parallels what a lot of people have been thinking. And it’s only two or three clicks beyond the worst you can think of Donald Trump. It’s not completely out of the realm of plausibility.

Buckley: Actually, it’s a little more innocent than the realities we’re being forced to confront. One reality is—and this doesn’t have anything to do with Putin—when the final COVID death tally is tabulated, there will be some mathematical revelation of how many lives were forfeit because of his inaction and dithering and utter indifference.

This most recent Putin bounty scenario—it’s hard to imagine one more loathsome. Now, we don’t know if it’s actually true. I will give Mr. Trump the, you know, I will afford him the … [sigh] Will I really? A presumption of innocence?

Ferguson: I was wondering where you were going with this.

Buckley: Anyway, my scenario is rather more playful. It has to do in fact with the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow. I was quite attracted to that as an occasion of sin.

Ferguson: Trump was quite attracted to it too, obviously.

Buckley: Yes, he was! He kept referring to it as the greatest Miss Universe contest ever. I thought, Hmm, well, why would he think that? What made it so great? Let’s just imagine.

[Read: Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election]

Ferguson: One thing I thought of while I was reading this book: There is a school of thought abroad in the land that Trump can’t really be made fun of, because he’s such a disaster. I’ve seen this firsthand. For some people, he’s like a big Hoover vacuum cleaner that just sucks up people’s sense of humor. If you try to make light of this really sort of ridiculous man, the response is: “That’s not funny! How dare you!” Did you think about that at all?

Buckley: I did. What you say reminds me a little bit of what, in a different context, Samuel Foote once said of someone—that he was not only dull but the cause of dullness in others.

There’s power in ridicule as a countermeasure. There was a movie recently, and a very fine one, called Jojo Rabbit. It’s the work of a talented director [Taika Waititi]. And in that, he manages to make Hitler a comic character—I emphasize: up to a certain point. Or look at another fairly recent film, which I thought was incredibly deft and wonderfully done: Death of Stalin. Imagine if I’d said to you, “I’ve got this idea for a comedy. You want to hear the title? The Death of Stalin!” You might logically assume I’d been overserved at lunch with martinis. And yet it’s an incredibly brilliant film about an ultimately uncomic occurrence.

I think Trump is fair game for ridicule. Why do I think this? Because it drives him nuts. After one of the Saturday Night Live episodes, in which he’s portrayed quite brilliantly by Alec Baldwin, he tweeted that this ought not to be allowed. So the president of the United States is up tweeting at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, demanding that the FCC make Saturday Night Live illegal. You know you’re batting a thousand when you’re annoying the president of the United States that way.

And thank heavens this is the United States. You can’t do this in Hong Kong anymore. You can’t do this in Russia. I’m guessing we still can do it here—although if Mr. Trump had his way, you and I would be having this conversation in Cell Block B at Rikers Island.

The thing is, it’s not particularly funny, what’s happening. It’s ghastly. But does that mean we shouldn’t ridicule it? I’m not so sure. If nothing else, laughter is the best revenge.

Ferguson: It’s interesting—that late-night tweet about Baldwin is a perfect example. I’m always astonished to consider that the president isn’t a drinker. He’s up at four in the morning tweeting strange and incomprehensible things, giving answers 12 and 14 minutes long at his own press conferences, repeating himself. He behaves like one of the worst drunks you could ever imagine.

Buckley: I think they call it a “dry drunk” at AA. I’ve only heard this, mind you, from other people.

There will be many psychological biographies written about this guy. At one level, I don’t think he’s that complicated. I think he’s a malignant narcissist who is ignorant and defiant and amoral. I don’t think I can imagine this guy shedding a tear over anything. To the extent he rises to the level of tragic hero—and I’m not sure he does—it would be only in the sense of the majesty of his self-involvement. One gropes for other historical or literary comparisons.

I have to force myself to watch things like the Tulsa rally for forensic reasons. Was it only last Saturday? It seems like several years ago. He began in on the ramp rant—about the West Point ramp. I actually started timing him, and he went past 10 minutes. I thought, How long is this going to go on? This is Eugène Ionesco on steroids. This is theater of the absurd meets Nightmare on Elm Street.

[Andrew Ferguson: Signs that Trump was furious in Tulsa]

Ferguson: We were both speechwriters, briefly, for the first George Bush. I find myself trying to imagine being a speechwriter in the White House today, having to sit and listen to Trump, where every sentence you’ve written just becomes an occasion for him to start off on another one of his riffs, usually something he’s said a hundred thousand times.

Buckley: If you’re inviting me to feel sorry for Stephen Miller, I think I’ll pass. But it’s remarkable how lifeless Trump sounds when he is speaking from a script. You can almost see the thought bubble going up over his head: This is sooo boring.

And, of course, he told us this himself a couple of years ago. At one of these rallies, he said something like “People tell me, you know, I should be presidential. Why do I want to be presidential? Presidential is so boring.” There’s no reason we should expect dignity and majesty coming from him.

He has in him the totalitarian oratorical inclination to go on and on. This is, I suppose, one of the symptoms or by-products of narcissism—the absolute certainty that you are being compelling. As I watched the Tulsa rally, though, I noticed the yawns, and people turning to their iPhones. I thought, This might be a tipping point—this might just be the tipping point where they finally see the emperor has no oratorical clothes—where he has become boring.

Of course, this guy has taken us past more tipping points than an Olympic hurdler.

Ferguson: Let me ask you another thing about the new book. Your second book, your first novel, The White House Mess, was in the form of a White House memoir, and Make Russia Great Again is also a White House memoir. You seem to have an affinity for that very particular literary form.

Buckley: Yes, my first novel was a faux—or as we say now, a fake—Washington memoir by a White House chief of staff named Herb. This is my 19th book, a fake memoir by a White House chief of staff named Herb. So I’m ready for the reviewers to say, well, Buckley has traveled the gamut from A to B, or from A to A.

Ferguson: Probably best to say you’ve come full circle.

Buckley: Well, it’s a kind of bookend. I probably won’t be writing another White House memoir. But it’s a fascinating, very rich subliterary genre. Everyone who works at the White House for more than five minutes writes a memoir. The White House dog keeper wrote a memoir. I think it was like 500 pages. They all tend to have two themes: One, it wasn’t my fault; and two, it would have been much worse if I hadn’t been there.

Herb, the main narrator in the new one, he’s sort of a likable schlub. He’s basically an innocent. He used to be the food and beverage manager at Trump’s other resort, Farrago-sur-Mer. Trump calls him, and he’s fired his six chiefs of staff at this point, and he begs Herb to come on board. I’d say he’s a good guy in a bad place. His observations are naive and innocent, and therefore, I think, the comedy is amplified.

Ferguson: There’s a peculiar psychology to White House staffers—maybe it’s true in all of politics. They all have an element of hero worship—they’re there to serve this superior person in rank and stature—and yet at the same time they, of all people, are more exposed to the weaknesses that all aspiring great men and women are heir to.

Of course, with Trump there’s an additional complication in the psychology. You have a great line in which Herb finally becomes self-aware.

Buckley: He says, “It had gotten to the point where I felt virtuous merely by not saying something that was false.”

Yeah, in a normal White House, which this seems not to be, the relationship between principal and staffer could probably be called a healthy codependence. They’re both there for their own reasons. A good leader like Bush 41—you loved the guy because he was lovable, and he was good, and it wasn’t about him. He may well be the most selfless man ever to occupy the White House.

With this guy, it’s different. It’s frankly hard at this point to imagine why anyone would want to work for him. I think the “I’m doing this for the good of the country” explanation rings a little bit hollow.

Ferguson: Have you read John Bolton’s book? It’s only 600 pages.

Buckley: It just arrived yesterday, and I can’t wait to plunge in. I should point out that it is published by Simon & Schuster. My book is published by Simon & Schuster. And the Mary Trump book [is also soon to be published by Simon & Schuster], which I’m very much looking forward to reading. So we have a trio of Trump memoirs coming out.

Mine is the little guy. Bolton’s book has sold 780,000 copies. And Mary Trump’s book is going to be a monster. I feel a little bit like the stick of chewing gum between these two main courses. My only consolation in being the Lilliputian here in this triad is that mine’s fiction. So we’ll see whose book is still being read 10 years from now.

In our lifetimes, we’ve gone from Emmet John Hughes, a speechwriter for Eisenhower, who wrote a book in the ’50s while Ike was still in power, or maybe just after, called The Ordeal of Power, the first modern White House memoir, and the reaction was appalled. By today’s standards, it was as bland as cream of wheat. He said nothing untoward. He didn’t reveal confidences. I don’t think he even quoted anyone in any meetings. And yet it was considered monstrously inappropriate to write such a book. We have traveled that distance in our lifetime to this.

[Graeme Wood: John Bolton tries to recover his dignity]

Ferguson: Your novel The White House Mess was published in 1986, toward the end of the Reagan administration. It opens with Ronald Reagan, who’s slightly dotty at the end of his second term, refusing to leave the White House on Inauguration Day. If Trump loses, do you foresee anything similar happening next Inauguration Day?

Buckley: Yeah, that’s how the book started, and it got the book a lot of attention, that prologue. I certainly don’t claim any prescience. I mean, President Reagan was having the occasional dotty moment toward the end of his term. But he was also having some pretty cool non-dotty moments—as when he said, “Tear down this wall.”

That was just sort of a fun idea. Reagan’s not not leaving for malevolent reasons; he’s just a little dotty, and he just doesn’t feel like leaving right then. Maybe he’ll leave tomorrow. Meanwhile, the motorcade is waiting; the world is waiting.

I was interviewed about the book by The Washington Post, and I expressed worry that, you know, this might not seem funny to the Reagans, both of whom I had known since I was 13 years old, because my father [the journalist William F. Buckley] was close to them. Four days later, I get a handwritten letter from the White House. I opened it and it was from the Gipper, saying that he was delighted to have played a small role in the success of my book.

Did I weep at this man’s funeral? Yes.

Several years later, he wrote that one-draft letter to the American people telling us that he, as he put it, like “millions of other Americans” had Alzheimer’s. Note, by the way, how he put that: He was basically saying he was just unum among the pluribus. The refusal to take center stage. And we all wept at that letter.

Now flash forward to a different era. Trump is essentially issuing threats that if he loses this election, it will be because it was rigged. And so we face that possible drama. He may put us through hell.

Ferguson: Well, all he has to do is try, and he can put us through hell.

Buckley: I’d say we’re already in hell. It’s just a question of what circle of hell.

[David A. Graham: Who wants to be seen with Trump anymore?]

Ferguson: As a onetime Republican, do you have any thoughts about what the Republican Party is supposed to do after Trump is gone? Will it still exist?

Buckley: The Republican Party that you and I once knew and loved is over. It’s gone. One looks at the Republican Senate and, with one or two exceptions, despairs. There’s something, to me, almost more odious than Trump himself in the sum of his enablers and apologists and lickspittles.

My favorite character in the book is a certain southern senator, Squigg Lee Biskitt.

Ferguson: Of the great state of South Carolina. The president gives him a particularly pungent nickname.

Buckley: Yes, he does, which I’m not going to say. But, yeah, it’s in there. I had fun with that character. Lindsey Graham was once John McCain’s wingman, as he used to describe himself. I don’t understand how he could have made that journey from being John McCain’s wingman to Donald Trump’s lapdog. I don’t get it.

It’s fallen to Mitt Romney to express what once would have been the opinion of the majority. I am proud to say that my uncle Jimmy Buckley, when he was U.S. senator from New York, was the first Republican to urge Nixon to resign—in early 1973, well over a year before Nixon left office. I say this with frank family pride: I look in vain trying to find a Jimmy Buckley in the Republican Senate today.

Ferguson: One last thing: You were great friends with Christopher Hitchens, a writer much beloved by Atlantic readers for many years. He’s been gone for—

Buckley: He left us way too early, age 62, in 2011, so we’re coming up on a decade.

Ferguson: Do you ever think about what he’d be writing?

Buckley: I think about it all the time. He was so brilliant and so eloquent that I tremble to attempt to put words in that golden mouth. Being with Christopher was, as he might say, always a feast of reason and a flow of soul.

I think it’s certainly likely that he would be appalled—in particular by, say, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and Trump’s cosseting of the man who might as well have held the bone saw: Mohammed bin Salman. Hitch was always saddled up and put on the buckler and lance in defense of his colleagues, and I think he would have considered Khashoggi one of his colleagues. I think he would have been appalled by the recent revelation that Trump told President Xi of China that he was perfectly fine with his putting a million Uighurs in concentration camps.

I wish we could have Christopher’s take on a thousand things—on Boris Johnson, on Prince Harry and Meghan. Certainly he would have given us a very fine descant on the cravenness of the Republican Senate.

In his posthumously published book, Mortality, he quotes a poem that always makes me think of him. “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead / They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed / I wept when I remembered how often you and I / Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.” I miss him. A lot of people miss him.

Ferguson: That’s a perfect place to close. It’s very Hitchens-like of you to be able to recite that off the top of your head.

Buckley: Well, I managed stanza one. He would have done one, and then stanzas two, three, and four.

Leave Lincoln Out of It

2020-06-30T07:00:00-04:00

To take a full accounting of Donald Trump’s corrosive effect on our politics, you need to look at his enemies. After the president’s disappointing (for Trump fans) rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a political action committee calling itself the Lincoln Project jumped into the fray, as it tends to do, with both feet. It released not one but two video ads ridiculing the president.

The first was about Trump’s claim at the rally that he asked his “people” to slow down the pace of coronavirus testing. Trump’s spokesperson later said the remark was “in jest,” and the president himself told an interviewer it was “semi–tongue in cheek.” But it is the job of the president’s opposition nowadays to pick and choose what to believe. The Lincoln Project chose to believe his first remark, drawing the implausible inference that the president actually wanted to slow testing, which would only inhibit the reopening of the economy, the one thing he doesn’t want to do. I think I’ve got that right.

The voice-over of the first ad was male and stentorian; that of the second was female and mocking. The second commercial was called “Shrinking.” “Hey Donald,” the announcer said. “Turnout in Tulsa? A dud. You’ve probably heard this before, but it was smaller than we expected.” Cut to a shot of Trump bringing his palms together. “It sure wasn’t as big as you promised. Honestly, we’re not surprised … We’ve seen that you’re shaky, you can’t keep your polls up … sad, weak, low energy. Just like your presidency. Just like you.”

When the project’s Twitter account announced the ad’s debut, it made sure to tag Stormy Daniels.

[Read: The temptation of Kayleigh McEnany]

“Shrinking” was in the spirit of another recent Lincoln Project product, called “Trump Is Not Well,” from earlier this month. That ad used footage from Trump’s speech to the graduating class at West Point. Over pictures of the president holding a glass of water with two hands, the voice-over suggested he was suffering from some kind of disability that rendered him unfit for high office, evidently based on the theory that our nation’s commander in chief must be able to sip water with one hand.

The Lincoln Project’s ads—personally abusive, overwrought, pointlessly salacious, and trip-wired with non sequiturs—are familiar: They are undertaken with all the relish the president shows when he jokes about the mental hiccups of “Sleepy” Joe Biden, just as four years ago, he happily implied that Hillary Clinton suffered from some nameless disease. One reason Trump does this is to annoy his opponents; now his opponents’ supporters are returning the favor.

The ads’ intended audience may be a surprise. In December, the PAC’s organizers published a manifesto in The New York Times, to mark their group’s launch. The headline read: “We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated.”

“The 2020 general election, by every indication, will be about persuasion,” the organizers wrote. “Our efforts are aimed at persuading … disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts.” As for the name, they said, “We look to Lincoln as our guide and inspiration.”

The claim to the mantle of Abraham Lincoln was truer than the organizers knew. Long before he was made a martyr and then a myth, Lincoln was a small-time politician on the Illinois prairie, with a talent for what one of his biographers, Douglas Wilson, called “attack journalism.” Throughout his early career, he filled the columns of party newspapers with scurrilous, usually anonymous assaults on his political adversaries. Lincoln used every tool in the demagogue’s kit—slander, innuendo, mockery. Factual accuracy didn’t restrain him, on those rare occasions when facts were at issue.

Lincoln knew his audience. His readers, Wilson wrote, were “basically partisan.” “They tended to take delight in any and all hits against their political opponents. The seductive appeal of demagogy is, of course, that meanspirited and unfair arguments do score points.”

[Adam Serwer: Trump is struggling to run against a white guy]

Such arguments, in other words, thrill those already on board, and only those. The Lincoln Project’s ads are not, as the manifesto claimed, “about persuasion.” Like a Trump rally, the ads work exclusively on the predispositions of the faithful. Try to imagine the “disaffected conservatives” or “Republican-leaning independents” whom the Lincoln Project says it hopes to win over. They straddle their fences, scroll through their timelines, leaning first this way then that … Biden, Trump … Trump, Biden … until at last they come upon a Project Lincoln ad and they discover—can it be?—that the president’s genitalia aren’t functioning nearly as well as the world thought!

“By God,” they might cry. “This is the last straw! We need Joe Biden to restore the soul of America!”

But probably not.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the Lincoln Project isn’t quite what it told us it wanted to be, given how many politicos fly under false colors in the Trump era.

The project’s board of advisers includes a few figures who might be described as “famous for Washington”—and famous for doing the things that all professional Washington operatives do. In a report last month, the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign-finance watchdog group, wrote that the Lincoln Project is engaging in practices similar to those of pro-Trump PACs.

“The Republican super PAC has amassed a substantial war chest,” the report said, “but it has come under scrutiny for funneling money to its advisory board members and spending relatively little airing political ads to influence voters. The group also hides some of its vendors by stealthily paying subcontractors, making it difficult to follow the money. The Lincoln Project reported spending nearly $1.4 million through March. Almost all of that money went to the group’s board members and firms run by them.” This is, indeed, similar to what all PACs have done from the day of their invention.

Who are these swamp creatures? The political consultant Steve Schmidt guided John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign to a thunderous loss, and then quickly repaid his old boss by relating unflattering confidences to the authors of a gossipy campaign book. (The book’s depiction of Schmidt, by contrast, was highly favorable.) Another political consultant, Rick Wilson, was the creator of a campaign ad questioning the patriotism of Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran and a triple amputee; McCain called the ad “reprehensible,” and most Republicans agreed.

George Conway, another project adviser, was for decades a well-connected stalwart of the further reaches of the conservative movement, where he met and married Kellyanne Conway, now a counselor to Trump. More recently he has drawn attention not only as an energetic anti-Trump activist but also as one-half of the most mysterious marriage in American history. The political consultant John Weaver is known for directing McCain’s first losing presidential campaign, in 2000, after which he went to work for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. (He gingerly returned to the GOP fold by signing on to the fugitive presidential campaigns of Jon Huntsman and John Kasich, in 2012 and 2016, respectively.)

[Read: Rush Limbaugh is cheating on conservatism with Donald Trump]

The uneven pedigree of this motley crew hasn’t kept mainstream publications from referring to the Lincoln Project as a “conservative PAC.” This misnomer affords the group the privilege of having their cake and eating it too: Coming from Republicans, their attacks may appear fresh, principled, and transpartisan, while remaining stale, unprincipled, and partisan. Like many unhappy former Republicans, the leaders of the project have crossed over from being “never Trump” to being “never Republican,” taking aim even at such GOP moderates as Cory Gardner and Susan Collins. Their most recent ad, called “How a President Leads,” is an unabashed valentine to Joe Biden.

Which is fine! But they’d do better, for the sake of history and intellectual honesty, to leave Lincoln out of it. Lincoln ripened, history shows us, and grew away from the young pol he’d been on the Illinois prairie. The circle of his sympathy expanded, his soul deepened. Such growth is unlikely to overtake the Lincoln Project while it peers obsessively at the object of its hatred. This is an old story: We become what we behold. The project partakes of the spirit of a famous Republican president, all right. But he’s not Lincoln.

Signs That Trump Was Furious in Tulsa

2020-06-21T15:07:00-04:00

In the end, history may record that the most revealing thing about President Trump’s rally in Tulsa last night was the way it was covered by the all-news networks. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News had plugged the event as if it were the Pro Bowl. The anchors and reporters vamped for hours with pregame analysis and on-the-scene color shots as the big kickoff approached. And then the moment arrived and the time for commentary ended and … only Fox went ahead and aired the rally.

I had my remote doing laps, hopping from one channel to the next. On Fox the president would be mugging and bellowing as his crowd went wild, and a few clicks away on the two liberal networks I’d find an anchor—Nicolle Wallace, Wolf Blitzer—encircled with pundits, Hollywood Squares style. In a split-screen frame or a corner box, you could see the president prowl and the commotion erupting soundlessly. Meanwhile the anchor and pundits reassured their viewers that the spectacle they weren’t letting them hear was appalling.

What a choice for Saturday-night viewing: You could watch a preening blowhard surrounded by lickspittles chirping on cue, or you could watch Trump at his rally.

[Read: Where was the ‘silent majority’?]

Trump had high hopes for the rally, his first since the coronavirus pandemic (“the Covid,” in Trump lingo) began. At a White House gathering Thursday afternoon, the president said, “We’re going to be in Oklahoma. And it’s a crowd like, I guess, nobody’s seen before. We have tremendous, tremendous requests for tickets like, I think, probably has never happened politically before.” The unusual use of I guess and I think is a signifier of the president’s false modesty: he knew, with Trumpian certitude, that he was going to break some attendance records in Tulsa.

It didn’t turn out that way, as the world knows, despite the best efforts of his publicists to insist otherwise. The most optimistic estimates put the BOK Arena at two-thirds full. As cameras scanned hectares of empty seats, the Fox News anchor, an emphatically incurious man named Jesse Watters, told his viewers, “It looks packed!” (Who ya gonna believe—me or my lyin’ cameras?) Trump’s down-bill warm-up acts—various members of his family mostly—pretended to marvel at the size of the crowd, turning their gaze upward as if they spied men in MAGA hats hanging from the rafters.

Various news reports told us that the president was furious at the lower-than-expected turnout, and at first there were signs of it. For one thing he took the stage more or less on time and according to schedule; on more enjoyable occasions he has delighted in waiting backstage, prolonging the tension and letting the crowd’s temperature rise just short of full boil. And then, having taken the stage in Tulsa, he skipped the usual impromptu jests and goofs of a man whose highest aspiration is to be the center of attention of an adoring crowd. Instead he plunged straight into his scripted remarks as they unspooled from his teleprompter.

Watching Trump read from a prompter is like watching a man slip into a straitjacket: the grimace, the grumble, the stiff movement of shoulders from side to side. “I stand before you to say …” It never lasts long. In Tulsa this businesslike efficiency, whatever its cause, quickly dropped away, and the president fell into his familiar ramble, returning now and then to the prepared speech. He uses the lines his speechwriters have provided him the way a swimmer uses a pool wall: touch, turn, and push—and then he’s off. (A pro tip for amateur Trump watchers: You know he’s back on the prompter when he stops gesticulating with both hands. When both hands are in play, he’s riffing.)

[David Frum: Trump’s 3-point plan to win in 2020]

He spoke for an hour and 40 minutes. He gathered strength and volume as he went, working through set pieces about Veterans Affairs, the “Chinese virus,” the spendthrift Democrats, “Sleepy” Joe Biden in his—Biden’s—basement, and a golden oldie about Trump’s negotiations with Boeing over the price of a new presidential plane (an account that wound around to NATO and Angela Merkel and troop withdrawals from Germany and then to … D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser?). The chaotic course Trump’s stories take is often hard to follow, owing usually to the president’s peculiar shorthand. The word they, for example, will often appear in back-to-back sentences with different, unspecified referents. In one brief span Saturday night they wanted to abolish ICE, go fight the bad guys, and open your mail. Sometimes he seems to be speaking a private language shared only between himself and his followers.

Even so, it often happens that the president’s audiences flag before he does, and Trump has to rouse them with something fresh. So it was in Tulsa. “People come up to me, they say, ‘How do you take it?’” he said. “I say, ‘What choice to do I have?’” As an example of how badly he’s treated by “the fake news,” he told the story of his famously shaky walk down a ramp at West Point last week, and of his uncertain grip on the glass of water he sipped from during his speech to the graduating cadets there.

Trump took nearly 15 minutes to tell the story. He reenacted his walk down the ramp not once but twice. Triumphantly he drank a glass of water without a tremor, and then tossed the glass aside theatrically, before turning away in disgust.

Thus the country was treated to a stunning sight: the president of the United States imitating a caricature of the president of the United States as he is defined by a relentlessly hostile press corps. It was bizarre; it was postmodern, even. It was yet another insult to the dignity of the presidential office. It was also the bravura performance of a showman in full command of his gifts—an essential display for anyone who wants to understand Donald Trump or the people who love him. And unless you were watching live on Fox News, you probably missed it.

‘Defund the Police’ Does Not Mean Defund the Police. Unless It Does.

2020-06-14T06:45:00-04:00

In the fall of 2016, a journalist popularized a catchy binary to describe the bizarre behavior of Donald Trump and the effect he had on his rapturous followers.

Supporters of the then–Republican presidential nominee, Salena Zito wrote, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Meanwhile, his detractors, including most of the mainstream press, “take him literally but not seriously.” His roundhouse exaggerations, the sarcasm, the slander, the spurious anecdotes, the not-quite-facts—if you took these literally, we were told, then Trump might indeed seem a clown, a candidate unworthy of the effort required to take him seriously.

If, on the other hand, you recognized his wildcat hyperbole as a signal of a larger virtue—that Trump was a disrupter rejecting conventional modes of political speech to further a coherent agenda—then you freed yourself to take him seriously as a possible president who could do important and necessary things.

This formulation was clever and grotesque at the same time. Although her words were meant to be descriptive, many American took them as prescriptive, and the reasoning worked on many fence-sitters I know. Politically these people were of conservative inclination, and they couldn’t otherwise bring themselves to vote for a candidate who, among countless outrages, insulted John McCain’s record as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The seriously/literally dichotomy gave them permission to think that they were confusing surface for substance, missing the essence beneath the cloud of bombast. They could persuade themselves that the bad taste was something other than bad taste. They could think that the lies were something other than lies.

Maybe I’m making the same mistake, but I am relieved to see now that I am no longer supposed to take liberal activists and politicians literally either. The airwaves and websites—even the newspapers, what’s left of them—have been overloaded with experts and journalists acting as interpreters for their left-wing brothers and sisters hollering from the barricades. They take the straightforward words of the activists and translate them into the soothing tones of the op-ed and the think-tank chin-wag. They serve as kind of a reverse version of Key and Peele’s Obama Anger Translator, the hovering id who bluntly expressed the passion that allegedly lay behind Barack Obama’s phlegmatic demeanor.

[Kristy Parker: Prosecute the police]

To take the most recent example, we are learning that “Defund the police” does not mean defunding the police. This will be a relief to many, many millions of Americans. The cry has been taken up nationwide over the past 10 days, from one street protest against police brutality to the next. Last weekend it became the occasion for public condemnation of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. He appeared at a protest in his hometown to confess his shame over “my own brokenness, my own failures” and also the failures of his city’s police department.

All well and good, said one of the protesters. (Not in those words.) The mayor’s brokenness aside, the relevant question was: “Will you defund the Minneapolis Police Department?” After a pause to make a slight adjustment to his drooping face mask, Frey said, “I do not support the full abolition of the police department.”

“All right,” replied his questioner, “then get the fuck out of here.” Which Frey did, through a gantlet of shouting protesters that recalled Cersei’s walk of shame in Game of Thrones. The mayor managed to remain fully clothed.

Maybe he can buck up now. Although the protesters explicitly, and without a doubt sincerely, told him they no longer wanted any police in their neighborhoods, more establishmentarian voices suggest we shouldn’t take them literally. “Defund the police” just means moving government money around, taking some from police and giving it to other parts of local government—schools, health clinics, housing authorities—that are more popular with protesters.

But confusion lingers. A Georgetown Law professor named Christy E. Lopez wrote a Washington Post op-ed that carried the headline, “Defund the police? Here’s what that really means”—the implication being that the catchphrase, taken on its own terms, is giving everybody the wrong idea, not to mention the willies.

“Be not afraid,” Lopez writes. “‘Defunding the police’ is not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds.” Unfortunately, the case she makes still sounds pretty radical, at least to a layman whose ears are tuned to words as they are normally used.

[Read: America Is Already Different Than It Was Two Weeks Ago]

Lopez’s premise is one with which I’m sure lots of police officers agree: We ask cops to do too much. They’re expected, Lopez writes, to resolve “verbal squabbles between family members” (in another rhetorical mode a law professor might call such squabbles “domestic violence”), move the homeless “from corners and doorsteps” (to clear public rights of way), and solve “school disciplinary issues” (many of which schools can’t).

“For most proponents, ‘defunding the police’ does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety,” Lopez writes, “and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight—or perhaps ever.”

These are reassuring words until you dwell on them. That ever rings an unsettling little bell. So the ultimate goal is for police to disappear, “perhaps” at some moment in the future? And note that “defunding” might very well zero out budgets for police, just not for “public safety”—a field that will come to include, by Lopez’s telling, therapists, medics, social workers, addiction counselors, and many other traditionally irenic trades. But … any cops in there? That is, the kind of public employees who arrest bad guys? Lopez is hazy on the point. Maybe bad guys will be zeroed out too.

So fear not: “Defund the police” does not mean defunding the police, except when it does, whether next week or in the next decade. One observer who insists on taking the phrase both seriously and literally is Joe Biden. On Monday the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee hastened to let American voters know that he doesn’t like the idea, whatever it is.

“No, I don’t support defunding the police,” he told CBS News, thereby saving his candidacy. Maybe he had to say it: A poll this week showed that just 16 percent of Americans support cuts to police funding. And last year Biden’s campaign released a proposal to increase federal funding for local police by $300 million, for measures that were once noncontroversial—for example, hiring more cops. With no more police to spend it on, Biden might not get to spend the $300 million at all. No politician will stand for that.

The literally/seriously conundrum is hard to avoid as the power of radicals increases on both ends of the political teeter-totter. When mainstream Democrats such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren embraced the catchphrase “Abolish ICE” (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency), they insisted the idea should be taken seriously, if not literally. They didn’t mean they wanted to literally abolish enforcement of customs and immigration laws, just to get rid of the agency that does the enforcing.

And Biden himself was recently tripped up by a literal reading of the slogan “Believe women.” Many of his supporters joined him in insisting the words be taken merely seriously, to mean “Believe women, but not Tara Reade.”

The number of activists, partisans, and politicians who hop back and forth across the literal/serious divide—saying something with no expectation they will be taken at their word—will only grow this season. The spectacle raises the obvious question of how we should take them: seriously, or literally? The answer, of course, is neither.

At the End of a Hellish Week, Trump Is a Happy Man

2020-06-06T07:00:00-04:00

This week began with angry Trump, but, don’t worry, it ended with the president as a happy man.

There he was Monday evening, jaw set in the familiar simian rictus, marching from the White House across Lafayette Square, with a cloud of flunkies and Secret Service agents trailing him. His path had just been cleared of inconvenient citizens by phalanxes of cops using tear gas in hopes of making the president’s walk in the park as pleasant and uneventful as a walk in the park. Still he scowled. Having crossed the square, he drew to a stop in front of the boarded-up parish house of St. John’s Church. The parish house was boarded up because someone had set fire to its basement during protests the night before. Maybe that’s why Trump was scowling. You can never tell. In any case, a Bible appeared and the president turned toward the cameras, hoisting it upside down. He pointed at it with his free hand. “A Bible,” he explained. Then he went home.

His critics quickly dismissed this episode as a mere “photo op.” The term was a favorite of the Episcopal bishop, who seemed angrier at Trump for using her church as a “prop” than at the arsonists who tried to burn it to cinders. Photo op, like talking point, is a generic, off-the-shelf insult, easily turned around and seldom effective. Photo ops are one of the primary means by which every president since Theodore Roosevelt has tried to impress the public. What made Trump’s photo op bizarre was that nobody could make out what it was supposed to mean.

[Read: The Christians who loved Trump’s stunt]

His beleaguered but always game press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, gave it a try in a briefing Wednesday. She wasn’t much help. The president’s stroll was a “leadership moment,” she said. (Just as photo op is a boneless insult, leadership is a boneless compliment.) “Look,” she said, “the President wanted to send a very powerful message that we will not be overcome by looting, by rioting, by burning.”

And indeed we won’t be, so long as each of us is surrounded by armed guards and has our path cleared by hundreds of policemen in riot gear. McEnany compared the president’s photo op to other leadership moments, such as “Jimmy Carter putting on a sweater to encourage energy savings.” A photo op is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s no good.

A certain kind of person, if he makes a mistake, thinks he can convince people it wasn’t a mistake by quickly repeating it with confidence and élan. Musicians do this all the time when they’re improvising, and some are hailed for their genius. That trick is riskier for politicians. The day after he was widely denounced for symbolically saving St. John’s Church from arson, Trump corralled his wife and drove up to another religious site, this one run by Catholics, compounding his errors of taste and tactic and lending them an ecumenical flair. The president and first lady clenched hands and grinned—well, the president grinned; the first lady looked as if she wished she’d never left Slovenia—outside the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in northeast Washington. Then they went home.

Again, the reasoning behind the president’s trip was unclear. And again, the designated prelate unloaded on him.

“I find it baffling and reprehensible,” the archbishop of the diocese of Washington said in a written statement, “that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people, even those with whom we might disagree.”

The archbishop was giving the president too much credit—a mistake Trump critics often make. No one could say that the president’s purpose was inappropriately political for the simple reason that nobody could say what his purpose was. He uttered not a word. He scarcely opened his mouth. Later in the day, staff at the shrine explained that the trip had originally been marked on the White House calendar as the occasion for the president to sign an executive order about religious freedom around the world. As executive orders go, this is about as salutary and unobjectionable a cause as anyone could ask for. Yet it went completely unpublicized.

[David Graham: Trump has imprisoned himself in the White House]

As it happened, the president signed the order when he got back to the White House, in private, without public comment. Perhaps he just wanted to go for a drive. We’re all getting cabin fever.

And then Trump went to ground. His official schedule was light, and the few events that appeared on it—“1:15: The President has lunch with the Secretary of State”—would have been interesting to only the most passionate Trump obsessives. At last the president emerged in the Rose Garden Friday morning, under a blazing sun in high humidity, with a flight of financial advisers arrayed behind him. He arrived in the wake of genuinely good news, the first good news in weeks, it seemed—months, for that matter, maybe years. Rather than the expected further decline in employment, the economy somehow added a couple million jobs last month, and the unemployment rate dropped from 14.7 to 13.3 percent when “economists’ expectations” were that it would rise to 19 or even 20 percent. Had we at last touched bottom? The president was determined that it should be so.

The effect was disorienting. The president came to the Rose Garden to sign the latest pandemic-relief bill. Spending public money—he often speaks of it as his own—always lifts his spirits, but the combination of good news, sunshine, and three days of public silence unleashed an effusion of words and good feeling we’ve rarely seen before, certainly in the past months. The dam broke. Trump spoke for nearly 40 minutes without pause, a rapturous soliloquy of almost 6,000 words. He barely spoke of George Floyd or the protests—although he called it “a great day for him”—but he did queue up his greatest hits in a playlist that never ends. “We Had the Greatest Economy in the History of the World,” and “We Stopped People Coming From China (Very Early On).” “The Greatest Economy [Part Two].” “We May Have Some Embers—But We Will Put Them Out.” “What Happened Should Never Have Happened.” “The Cupboards Were Empty.” “The Greatest Economy [Remastered].” Also, a new, unexpected release: “Thank You Very Much to the Democrats.”

He had a text in front of him, prepared remarks that he would occasionally read verbatim and then provide commentary on. He glanced at the text. “It is time for us,” he read, “to work together as we rebuild, renew, and recover the great promise of America.” A brief pause, a look around. “And that’s true!” he improvised, as if taken by surprise with an odd sensation. It was a measure of the president’s delight with the good news that many of his other hits—dirges really—went completely unsung: The moodiness of “No Collusion,” for example, or the dark, driving “Greatest Scandal in the History of Our Country.” Behind him, the yes-men sweltered under the punishing sun, swaying slightly like a stand of poplars, and I thought of Alec Guinness and his fellow officers in The Bridge on the River Kwai, struggling to stay upright in the Japanese prison yard.

But there was more. The president signed the legislation and then invited others to come to the podium to share the good cheer and offer praise. They obliged, he accepted.

“I’ll be brief as I can,” said Lawrence Kudlow, the president’s economic adviser (he played one on TV). “I know it’s pretty darn hot.”

The president looked around again. “I haven’t noticed it,” he said. Nothing could defeat his happiness. “Is it hot?” He shrugged, and beamed.

Trump Tries to Sink Twitter, His Oldest Enabler

2020-05-30T07:00:00-04:00

Tweets can be career-enders for the twits who post them. Remember the Taco Bell employee from 2012 who didn’t reckon it a firing offense to tweet a video of himself peeing onto a sumptuous heap of Nachos BellGrande. To no one’s surprise but his own, he reckoned wrong.

I’ve often wondered whether President Donald Trump, with his impulsive, counterproductive, inadvertently self-revealing tweets, could ever meet the same fate. The question was raised anew (by me) this week. It was a week shortened by the holiday, and Trump made fewer public statements than he does in a normal week. And so, away from the gaze of his admirers and the prying eyes of the press, he tweeted instead.

Seeing Trump exclusively through the prism of Twitter gives an incomplete picture, of course. It is best to take him in his totality as a public figure, not only on social media but also in the zig and zag of his press briefings, in his Oval Office Q&As, in the set-piece speeches with their mash-ups of scripted rhetoric and chaotic improvisation, in the answers shouted above the roar of Marine One. Yet Twitter isolates parts of his public approach to the world and throws them into sharp relief—useful to anyone more interested in understanding him than in hating or venerating him, if any such people are left after the past four years. (Anyone? Anyone?)

You can be forgiven for forgetting—especially after his “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet, sent out while cities burned—that Trump’s personal Twitter feed occasionally suggests normality. With the approach of Memorial Day last weekend, he was retweeting a series of public-service announcements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “STOP THE SPREAD OF GERMS … Wash your hands often … Be mindful of social distancing this Memorial Day weekend.”

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s warped definition of free speech]

The tweets wafted through in the late afternoon, evoking the languor of approaching dusk. For a moment, the illusion of a public-spirited chief executive rose up, encouraging his fellow citizens with paternal care, alert to alarms that might upset the commonwealth but eager to give reassurance. Night fell.

“OBAMAGATE!” screamed a tweet suddenly. It was 11 p.m. The tweet was followed violently by the next: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” The tweets offer no context, no clarifying commentary, no hint of what might have inspired them. Did a random snarl from Laura Ingraham suddenly pop into his mind? Did a late-night phone call from a flunky and fellow insomniac—“I can’t believe what those bastards tried to do to you, sir”—act like a bellows on the ever-glowing embers of his resentments? We will never know. He returned to whatever he was doing and went quiet for the night. Eventually, the mysterious “OBAMAGATE!” tweet was “liked” 320,000 times, presumably by people with no more clue than the rest of us as to why he had decided to tweet it in the dead of night, but who delighted in it for reasons of their own.

First thing the next morning, the president posted a thread. He threatened to pull August’s Republican National Convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, unless the state’s “Democrat governor” agreed to allow the full complement of tens of thousands of Republicans, journalists, concessionaires, and hangers-on into “the Arena,” where they would be free to breathe on one another unmolested by the state-sponsored Karens of public health. Arriving in four parts, the thread was Homeric by the president’s own standards and by the those of Twitter, which pounds the human attention span into powder. As if to demonstrate the point, the president’s Twitter line erupted again with self-retweets from the previous night: “OBAMAGATE!” and “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Again, no way to know why. Self-retweeting offers private pleasure that requires no justification beyond itself. (The president also found time Tuesday to mention a “boring but very nasty magazine,” The Atlantic.)

The president is a great retweeter, of course. He has been known to post more than 100 tweets from other accounts in a single day. His most popular retweet from Memorial Day weekend was a photo of Joe Biden looking Snoopy-like in a virus-defeating face mask. Thus Trump at once explicitly ridiculed his political opponent and, by implication, the whole idea of mask wearing. Or maybe not! That’s the beauty of retweets. Trump has never bothered to say in his Twitter bio or elsewhere whether his “retweets = endorsements.” He makes full use of the ambiguity, publicizing the opinions of other twits and then scurrying away from their implications, as when he retweeted a tweet calling for the firing of Anthony Fauci, with whom he was apparently and momentarily displeased. With its lightning pace and constant churn, its quick and indiscriminate burial of falsehood and truth in the endless blizzard of new assertions, Twitter is the perfect medium for having your cake and eating it too.

The medium’s systemic indifference to accuracy and truth makes what happened the day after Memorial Day all the more peculiar. The president began the morning flogging one of his recent obsessions: the terrible scourge, as he sees it, of mail-in voting. His tweets on the subject, as on other subjects, were scattershot and only semi-coherent, containing half-truths, outright inaccuracies, and speculation expressed as fact. Typical Twitter fare, in other words, from the president no less than his enemies. Out of nowhere, gnomes from Twitter’s corporate hierarchy appeared. They hung the tweets with a Twitter-blue exclamation point. Twitter directed readers to “fact-checks” from CNN and The Washington Post, two mainstream news organizations reflexively (and sometimes comically) hostile to Trump and whatever his agenda happens to be at the moment. “We added a label,” Twitter’s nameless gnomes explained, “to enhance our civic integrity policy.”

[Read: Trump is doing all of this for Zuckerberg]

A civic-integrity policy? Twitter? The mind reels. You might as well take an abstinence class at a bordello. Trump’s outrage was volcanic, and I can’t really blame him. He opened his Twitter account more than a decade ago. If he’s tweeted once, he’s tweeted, well, 52,000 times. And now Twitter has decided he shouldn’t get away with it any longer? Trump must have felt like Babe Ruth, who, according to an old story, spent the first several innings of a sweltering ball game consuming a half-dozen hot dogs, a couple of hamburgers, several boxes of Cracker Jack, and a dozen pretzels washed down by nearly as many bottles of beer. Before taking the field in the seventh inning, he wolfed down an apple. A minute later, he collapsed in right field. When he came to, he said: “I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that apple.” (The story is possibly apocryphal. We must get the Post to fact-check it.)

Trump’s immediate reaction to that blue exclamation point was Trumpian—in a tweet, he re-upped a revolting accusation against a random political enemy. Had Joe Scarborough, the early-morning-talk-show host, murdered a young female intern 20 years ago? “Maybe or maybe not,” the president tweeted with a regal shrug. He was just asking! Again, the mechanics of Twitter exposed him in ways none of his other bad habits does. The tweet couldn’t help him in any conceivable manner beyond the immediate, prurient thrill it must have given him, and it very likely hurts him with the fence-sitting swing voters whom he will need most in November. Repeating the claim served chiefly to demonstrate that his compulsion to strike back at his enemies—any enemy will do—easily overwhelms his ability to make rational calculations about his future.

But how far does he dare go? On Thursday, Trump struck back with an executive order directing his administration to reconsider the special legal protections that enable Twitter and other social media to survive. The statutory exemption from libel suits, for example, has made possible the coruscating eruptions of falsehood and innuendo that keep Twitter going and make it indispensable to so many of the twits. Without the exemption, the company likely wouldn’t continue in anything like its present form. Trump wants to end Twitter as we know it—as he knows it.

Trump is making a strange bet, freighted with ironies that double back on themselves. Nothing—at least this week—would please the president more than to sink Twitter, his newest enemy. And yet nothing would deprive him of more pleasure than losing Twitter, his oldest enabler. His two strongest instincts stand pitted against each other: his need for attention and his need to punish enemies—even an enemy whose business is to satisfy his need for attention. Consistency, ideological or personal, is not the president’s strong suit. But seldom has an inconsistency cut so deep.

Did Trump Really Take Hydroxychloroquine?

2020-05-23T06:00:00-04:00

President Donald Trump began his week with a staggering admission. Seemingly off the cuff, he announced that he was taking the drug hydroxychloroquine.

What followed was a public debate strange even by present standards. Was the president telling the truth, or was he lying, in a sly provocation, to annoy reporters who have fetishized his recurring promotion of the drug?

The evidence that the president was lying was strong. His lips were moving, for one thing. For another, he was vague and even self-contradictory about how long he’d been taking the drug and why. A statement issued later by his doctor was meant to serve as a confirmation, but never explicitly asserted that he had prescribed the drug for the president. And Trump is famously squeamish about ingesting foreign substances. A man who says he’s never allowed an intoxicant to pass his lips doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would submit his body as a test tube in a one-off nonclinical trial of a controversial drug.

A strong case for the skeptics!

And yet I have come to take the president at his word. Trump has a jumbo-size tolerance for risk. As a businessman, he was a high-wire act, swinging from one bankruptcy and defaulted loan to the next with scarcely a glance at the abyss yawning below him. His diet of taco bowls and Quarter Pounders and gobbets of ketchup washed away in rivers of Diet Coke is what you’d expect from an orphan boy with a bit of pocket money. He refuses any exercise more salubrious than stepping into and out of a golf cart. Maskless in the White House, he inhales unfiltered the vapors of the yes-men who surround him. With unsettling regularity, the man tempts fate—his own and ours.

[Read: The pandemic hasn’t changed voters’ minds about Trump]

Perhaps the most decisive evidence that he told the truth lies in the circumstances under which the president made his admission. He showed no trace of premeditation. He had finished a chummy meeting with restaurant owners in the White House. As is his wont, he opened the floor to questions from the press pool. If he had been planning to drop the hydroxy bomb on the assembled reporters, the subject would probably have been top of mind, leading him to raise it first thing.

But for President Trump, “top of mind” is a penthouse with a rapid and never-ending turnover in tenants. Any question can lead to any answer. At the restaurant meeting, the first question he was asked concerned Attorney General William Barr’s unwillingness to open a criminal investigation into Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Several questions followed, about Trump’s aide Peter Navarro, the World Health Organization, the secretary of state, Saudi Arabia’s arms deals, the possible economic recovery, and the role of inspectors general in the federal government.

Then he was asked about one of his recent tweets: that the “whole whistleblower racket” needed to be “looked at.” His answer led him, led us all, to an unexpected place.

“Sure,” the president replied. “I had a fake whistleblower originally.”

The originally was mysterious. Did he mean that, at the beginning, his whistleblower was fake, but then he got a subsequent whistleblower who was genuine, or that the whistleblower began as a fake but grew more authentic over time? The following sentences offered no clue.

“Because when he looked at my—he wrote down a conversation that was totally different from the conversation I actually had with the president of Ukraine. It was a fake whistleblower.”

[David Graham: Trump is now doing to himself what he’s done to the country]

Then came a “by the way.” In Trump soliloquies, by the way serves as a kind of turn signal, alerting his audience to a sharp change in direction, 90 degrees or more. “By the way, everybody knows who he is. He’s a political operative.” Then he drew back to offer an overview: “It was a phony, disgraceful period of time.”

From here, the president turned his focus—no, that’s not the word I want—his attention to the inspector general who brought the original fake whistleblower’s report to Congress. Unless you closely followed the details of impeachment (and, more miraculously, managed to remember them), you wouldn’t have the slightest idea what the president was going on about. His own mention of impeachment led him to dwell on the unanimous support he received from congressional Republicans. “Other than a half vote from Romney—and Romney is a, you know, loser.”

He returned to the fake whistleblower, which drew him inexorably, undeniably, to a discussion of Adam Schiff—“Shifty Schiff.” Again, someone unfamiliar with Schiff’s Inspector Javert–like pursuit of the president wouldn’t know what Trump was talking about. “Shifty Schiff went up before Congress … So he made a statement that was totally different from what I said. You know that. Eight times ‘quid pro quo.’ There were no quid pro quos. Nothing. Zero. Eight times—over and over again.”

At last, three minutes into his answer, after insisting that Schiff should have been thrown in jail, the president assumed an air of c’est-la-vie resignation.

“So, you know, that’s the way it goes. So you had a phony whistleblower.”

And then suddenly—no turn signals this time, just a screech of tires, the smell of rubber, another hard right turn, crossing multiple lanes of onrushing traffic: “And this other guy with the hydroxychloroquine—okay?—well, he—he went out and he’s the one that approved the hydroxychloroquine … The very important form, he signed it. Now, if he doesn’t believe in it, why would he sign it?”

Working journalists and proficient telepaths knew that by he, the president was referring to Rick Bright, a public-health official who was giving testimony to Congress about the emergency approval of hydroxychloroquine, an approval Bright himself had signed.

The president went on. “And a lot of good things have come out about the hydroxy. A lot of good things have come out. You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the frontline workers …”

A slight pause. “I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it.”

Say what you want about members of the White House press corps. It is a sign of utmost professionalism that none of them, upon hearing the president say this, reeled backward in the manner of Ralph Kramden, exclaiming, “Homina, homina, homina …”

As for the president, the exchange revealed a quality of his that is too seldom remarked upon: his insouciance. When he becomes entranced by the sound of his own voice, lulled by the meanderings of his line of thought, his insouciance often leads him into saying things that are true—candid admissions that he then desperately tries to justify.

“The frontline workers,” he said, “many, many are taking it.”

And: “Frontline workers take it.”

And: “A lot of frontline workers are taking hydroxychloroquine.”

And: “Many frontline workers take it.”

Eventually he gave up and pretended that he’d meant to say it all along. “I would’ve told you that three, four days ago,” he told reporters, “but we never had a chance, because you never asked me the question.”

Of course, they hadn’t asked the question at that moment either. He had been asked about a tweet attacking whistleblowers, and we ended up in a place far, far away.

The next day, the newsletter writers at The New York Times were unimpressed. “Trump claims to be taking an unproven medication,” was their sly phrasing. The president’s press secretary appeared to take offense. “The president said himself he’s taking it,” she said. “The president should be taken at his word.”

In making my case for the president’s authenticity in that moment, I’ll be the first to admit it’s not conclusive. But arguing that Trump was telling the truth provides such a pleasant change of pace.

Biden’s Virtual Campaign Is a Disaster

2020-05-15T06:45:00-04:00

Updated at 11:42 a.m. ET on May 15, 2020.

They say that if you live long enough, you’ll get to experience nearly everything, and so it has been for Joe Biden, who has lived to see history’s first Zoom presidential campaign. Unfortunately for him, it’s his.

Nobody looks good on Zoom—or FaceTime or Skype or any of the other online simulacra of human interaction that the lockdown has forced upon us. It diminishes all the distractions and intangibles that give life texture and zest, that make life seem rather pleasanter than it is. Did anyone fully understand just how unfunny late-night talk-show hosts are—take your pick; I pick Stephen Colbert—until the pandemic forced them online and deprived them of the Pavlovian and highly implausible laughter of their studio audiences? So too with political campaigns.

[Alex Wagner: Stay alive, Joe Biden]

What is a presidential candidate without cheering crowds, balloon drops, overbearing music, a stage choked with grinning sycophants? Or without a dour Jim Lehrer or even a Larry King prodding him with uncomfortable questions face-to-face ?

Now we know the answer. Last week, as Biden remained confined to his Delaware home, his campaign took to YouTube to put on a virtual rally. It’s still available online, though in truncated, buttoned-up, highly edited form. When it was unfolding in real time, it was messier.

The “site” of the rally was designated as Tampa, Florida. (New motto for politics in the age of Zoom: “If you can’t attend, at least pretend.”) It featured a brief parade of luminaries from the state Democratic Party. The party chair, a delighted woman named Terrie Rizzo, was first to appear on-screen, though she seemed not to know it at the outset, sitting in silence with a wide smile creasing her face for several uncomfortable seconds until she received an off-camera signal to commence. She responded with unmistakable vigor. Her voice and mouth were unsynchronized, however, and the choppy connection dropped every fifth or sixth syllable. “Let– g– to wrk! Go Joe!” she said in conclusion.

An offscreen announcer then asked us to welcome a young high schooler to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, just like at a real campaign rally. The choppy sound mattered less here because all of us, even Democrats, already know the words to the Pledge of Allegiance. In contrast to a real campaign rally, the pledge was followed by a long silence. Off camera, a frustrated voice growled: “Jesus.” Then, floating in another Zoom box, came—no, not Jesus—a man introduced as a regional organizer, who asked us all through a stuttering connection to host a virtual event. Presumably like this one.

[Read: Trump’s ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue’ campaign plan]

A rally needs music. “Ladies and gentleman,” said the disembodied announcer, “from Funkman Productions, DJ Jack Henriquez!” Suddenly a small, elderly man appeared in close-up, wearing a slouch hat and sunglasses. He was chewing gum and heaving his shoulders in time to a pop song by Haim. Colored lights shone behind the funkman. He jauntily wagged his finger in the air. He gave no indication that he knew he was being watched—indeed, he behaved as if he were sure he wasn’t. Again the camera lingered on him uncomfortably, dissolving at last to a photo montage of happier, pre-pandemic days. “Ordinary people,” as Biden likes to call them, were shown greeting the candidate, barely able to contain their joy. Soon the funkman was back with another song, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” a disco hit released 41 years ago, when Biden was entering his second term in the Senate.

Seldom has the need for a crowd—hundreds of humans, thousands of the buggers, packed together shank to flank—been felt so acutely. Without applause, laughter, and the crush of swaying bodies, the conventions of a political rally come off as ludicrous. For example, there is absolutely no reason for an old disco song to be played, ever, except to rouse an audience and prepare it to receive with wild abandon whatever comes next. At the virtual rally, what came next was Charlie Crist, the telegenically tanned former governor of the state where we were pretending to be. He was sitting before a Miami Beach backdrop.* He glanced skyward, in perfect silence. He took out a handkerchief, and he wiped his chin. At last he realized he was on live, and he began speaking. The sound, finally, came through unbroken. Then the screen went black. All we heard was his voice.

“If we work hard,” Crist said, “this man will become president of the United States. And God is going to be happy for it.” If your last name is Crist, you can say stuff like that.

And so it went, the blackouts, the indecipherable monologues, the speakers staring silently, endlessly, waiting for a prompt. I kept my eye on the viewer counter in the corner of the screen. From what I could tell, viewership peaked at 2,637 and then fell off a cliff as the technical troubles continued. The numbers rose a bit when, nearing the program’s end, the announcer spoke Biden’s name. The screen filled with a sunlit suburban room, and we saw a man in aviators approaching the camera from the glow of a patio. “Did they introduce me?” he asked, looking around. “Huh?”

Biden gave a version of his stump speech from the campaign trail, with unfortunate improvisations: “This country is really all about the American people,” he said. It felt like a mercy when, after he bade us goodbye, his image faded and a card came up advertising the Virtual Rally in Tampa, Florida, that had just ended.

[Read: The long arc of Joe Biden]

The whole rally was, in short, a disaster—not a lasting or sizable one, but easily, in its comprehensiveness, the equal of any in my political experience, and I covered the 2016 Jeb Bush campaign. The fundamental problem was conceptual. Biden’s handlers approached the challenge of bringing a rally online too literally. They tried simply to list the elements of a typical rally and tick off the boxes—music, check; Pledge of Allegiance, check; speeches, check; candidate remarks, check; Ray-Bans, check—and then throw them up on the web, in serial fashion. For Zoom-campaign operatives, the trick in the future will be to somehow re-create the essence of a real-life rally, its excitement and spontaneity, without straining after a precise simulation.

No one should underestimate the devastating effects of technological incompetence. We know that a lot of former Obama-administration officials are getting involved in Biden’s campaign, which is perfectly understandable, but the Tampa rally suggests he’s brought back the tech crew from the first Obamacare website.

Other online appearances have been more successful, though not very. Biden’s team has posted a number of endorsements, including one from his former rival Bernie Sanders. Watching the two candidates side by virtual side, viewers of a certain age had the happy experience of reliving the Bartles and Jaymes commercials of our youth. Hillary Clinton joined Biden in another Zoom town hall, her mandible-cracking smile showing dimly in her ill-lit living room. The timely subject of that segment was the effect of the pandemic on American women. They gave the issue of sexual assault special attention—but not so much attention that the subject of Tara Reade came up. “Violence against women is a huge problem,” Biden said.

The Virtual Rope Line with Joe Biden, in April, was a well-packaged sequence of mutual flattery between the candidate and his voters over Zoom, broken off at the four-minute mark. “Folks, I hope we can keep doing this,” Biden said from his basement recreation room, but he hasn’t. He expressed the same hope at the end of his Virtual Happy Hour a month before—a Zoom Q&A session with Millennials that has also proved to be a one-off. A Facebook series called Biden Brunch Live, for campaign workers, broadcasts weekly, but the candidate doesn’t attend. Biden and his staff are creating history’s first Zoom campaign as they go along, in fits and starts, by trial and error—a road map, so far, of dead ends.

In none of his Zoom appearances does Joe Biden ever appear to be anything less than a happy man. Yet he is a happy man who has reached the peak of his career in the rec room of his basement, talking into a computer. The crisis has forced him into being only a simulation of a presidential candidate. It has done the same to his rival, of course, but the difference is, his rival gets to be president too.

*This article previously misspelled Charlie Crist's name.

Trump Has a New Word Lump

2020-05-09T06:30:00-04:00

At last we reach the end of week two of the coronavirus-briefing lockdown. The daily press conference of the White House pandemic task force, with its supporting cast of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, Mike Pence and Steven Mnuchin orbiting the supernova star of the show, had become must-see hate-viewing for much of the country—both for those who despise the president and for those who revere him and relished the display of petulance and showboating sanctimony offered up by many members of his greatest, and perhaps most outgunned, adversary, the White House press corps. Trumpkins eat that stuff up with a spoon.

And then the briefings were over, called off by the president himself in a bitter tweet. He had evidently made a calculation that they were doing him more harm than good. In their place has come a series of public events of a more conventional character—brief Q&A sessions in the Oval Office, statements from the Rose Garden, roundtables with solicitous business owners and fawning legislators, and an occasional pressroom briefing by his new press secretary, gloating about successes real and imagined, as press secretaries are born to do.

But of course nothing that carries the Trump brand can be conventional. There were switchbacks and zigzags, surprises on top of surprises. Having discontinued the briefings by the task force, the president reasoned that the purpose of the task force itself was therefore exhausted—in keeping with a general belief that its primary value wasn’t to gather expertise and manage federal activity but to hold briefings at which the president could appear. No briefing, no task force! On Tuesday he mentioned offhand that the task force would be winding down; on Wednesday he tweeted that the task force would continue its work and probably grow bigger.

[Peter Wehner: The president is unraveling]

He explained himself to reporters a few hours later, in Trumpian fashion, at an event honoring nurses. He had no idea, he said, that the task force was so “popular.” His answer to the first question about his change of heart came in at just shy of 500 words. Another two questions brought the total up to a thousand, with several familiar stops along the way. He managed a nod to the greatest economy in history, to the greatest mobilization since World War 2, to the awful moment when “they” came to him and said, “We’re going to have to close our country,” to the millions of lives saved “by doing what we did,” plus a brief digression about how N95 masks are made.

But why the change of heart?

“I had a meeting yesterday,” he said. “I had a meeting this morning, probably even more importantly. And so we’ll be leaving the task force [alone] indefinitely.” What meeting yesterday? What meeting this morning? The flurry of words whipped on, and the nature of the mysterious meetings was quickly lost to history. “Nobody has ever turned me down to be on that task force,” he added unhelpfully.

One cause (or is it an effect?) of the president’s garrulousness is his need to load the answer to any question with those set pieces he keeps always at hand, those patented references to the disgraceful Russia hoax and the Mueller investigation and the failure of the Chinese to stop the virus, and so on. By my count, there are more than 20 of these word lumps. They vary in size. They line up in the president’s brain like skydivers at the open door of a plane, ready to be shoved out at any moment. He repeats them with undiminished pleasure and insistence, and seldom with any recognition that everyone within earshot has heard them dozens of times before.

[Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: What’s so hard to understand about what Trump said?]

This week will be known to Trumpologists of the future for the addition of a new word lump. It centers on the word “transition.”

“We have a transition third quarter,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall last weekend, speaking of the economy. “We’re going to have a very good fourth quarter. We’re going to have a great next year.”

This is the new lump in larval form, without the president’s embellishment.

Two days later, for a group of Native Americans, it sprouted tiny arms and took on some recognizable features: “I think you’re going to have a tremendous transition, which is a third-quarter thing,” he said. “I think you’re going to have a good fourth quarter. I think next year is going to be an incredible year, economically.”

Two days after that, Trump took questions with Governor Greg Abbott of Texas in the Oval Office:

“I think we both feel we’re going to have a transition period in the third quarter, and we’re going to have a very good fourth quarter. I think next year has a chance to be one of our really great years, economically.”

A few minutes later, it suddenly emerged fully formed:

“I’m viewing the third quarter as … a transition. I think you could almost say a ‘transition into greatness’ because I think next year we’re going to have a phenomenal year—a phenomenal year, economically.”

The next day, the lump was mature enough for the president to lie about it. Like so many Trumpian prevarications, it was superfluous, sent aloft merely for excitement and self-pleasuring.

In a meeting with congressional Republicans, he used the phrase “transition to greatness” a couple of times, rolling it on the tongue like a fine swig of Diet Coke. Then he pretended he had just thought it up on the spot, right there and then.

“It’s a great term,” he said. “It just came out, at this meeting. That’s right, it came out by accident. It was a statement, and it came out, and you can’t get a better one. We could go to Madison Avenue and get the best, the greatest geniuses in the world to come up with a slogan, but that’s the slogan we’re going to use: transition to greatness.”

The wellsprings of creativity are mystifying, and the Republicans must have been pleased to be witnesses to history. But not as pleased as the president himself, topping even the greatest geniuses in the world with his inspiration—if he did say so himself. And he did.

Trump’s Unending Ability to Astonish

2020-05-06T08:15:00-04:00

“We never had a more beautiful set than this, did we?” said Donald Trump Sunday night, looking very pleased. He was sitting, implausibly, at the feet of Abraham Lincoln—or rather, at the feet of Lincoln’s statue in the Lincoln Memorial—to take questions for a Fox News virtual town hall. The vast marble chamber was spookily lit to highlight Lincoln’s angled, impassive visage and our current president’s sumptuous corona, if you’ll pardon the expression, of tangerine hair.

The first question came from one of the two Fox anchors, Bret Baier, who wondered what the president would say to the opposing sides of the country’s many cultural fault lines: those who think it’s too early and unsafe to go back to work, and those who think the business shutdowns have gone on too long.

Trump’s capacity to astonish even his most jaded viewers is bottomless. Politicians love to accuse their rivals of “trying to have it both ways,” as if it were a capital offense against logic and leadership. A politician who really does want to have it both ways (and they all do) will scold his rivals for creating a “false choice.” (Barack Obama used the phrase so often, he could make it the name of his fishing boat.) But no politician in his right mind, under any circumstances, would ever dare to—

“I think you can have it both ways,” Trump said. At these moments his insouciance glows about him as brightly as his corona. Then, as a way to explain how that could actually happen, he answered by simply rephrasing the original question at much greater length and ending in midair, dropping to Earth with an authoritative “So I understand that very well.”

[Peter Wehner: The president is unraveling]

Another, less pressing question that went unanswered in Sunday night’s town hall was why, precisely, the hell these people were sitting in the Lincoln Memorial. Baier, understandably protective of his reputation as one of Fox’s bona fide journalists, wanted it understood that holding “this virtual town hall” in “this hallowed place” was the president’s idea. For his part, the president made clear that his aesthetic appreciation of the memorial runs deep.

“Aside from the fact that this was a great man [meaning Lincoln], this is a great work of art,” the president said. “That’s one of the greatest sculptures, one of the greatest statues, to me, anywhere in the world. And you can go to Italy, you can go anywhere. [Just not right now.] That’s, to me, one of the greats.” In a word: fabulous.

But as the town hall progressed, it became clear why President Trump wanted to sit with President Lincoln: They are brothers in arms against an unforgiving press corps. One sympathetic questioner, appearing by video, combined a plea with a question: Why does he “not directly answer the questions asked by the press but instead speak of past successes and generally ramble”?

“Look,” Trump said, “I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said Lincoln—nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”

Then he mentioned a parade of boats that went up the Intracoastal Waterway in Florida that afternoon shouting his name, which led him to mention his rebuilding of the military, which led him to his reform of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which led to a mysterious reference to “civil service in the unions,” followed by the Space Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the vanquishing of the ISIS caliphate, all by way of answering his questioner’s request that he stop rambling. I believe his answer was “no.”

The hostile press is never far from the president’s mind. The mutual contempt between Trump and most of the reporters who cover him has been offered as an explanation for his decision to discontinue his haunting and compelling coronavirus briefings. This misimpression was corrected by the president in an interview Monday with the New York Post. He told his interviewers that the briefings would resume, but with less frequency and in an altered form. This was before he announced that he might disband the coronavirus task force itself, as a natural adjustment to the evolving nature of the crisis. The task force had provided him with a rotating cast of supporting characters, a half-dozen Ethels to his own redheaded Lucy.

[Anne Applebaum: The rest of the world is laughing at Trump]

Why continue a spectacle for the press that many journalists themselves said wasn’t worthy of television? Simple. “We set every record with those press conferences,” he told the Post. “Six million people all the time. You know, we had tremendous numbers.” He said the “combative attitude” between himself and the press contributed to the ratings success: “I would say from the standpoint of watching it and wanting to watch, that would be more interesting than having boring questions asked.”

The most disorienting thing about the Trump presidency isn’t that he lies so often but that he so often tells the truth. The Post interview, with its bald admission of whoring after viewers, offered fresh evidence, and there’s been much more in the past 36 hours.

The great story of this month is the reopening of American businesses, now or later, here and there, and Trump, unlike many of his critics, has faced the fact that the reopening, whenever it happens, will exact dreadful costs.

In Phoenix yesterday, he gave an interview to David Muir of ABC. Muir asked him, “Do you believe that’s the reality we’re facing—that lives will be lost to reopen the country?”

Trump nodded. “It’s possible there will be some,” he said. He’d said as much to Bret Baier at the Lincoln Memorial. “There’s no win here,” he said. “Just so we all understand, there is no win. This is not a situation where there’s a win.”

In other words: We cannot, in fact, have it both ways.

Trump Tries to Be Normal

2020-05-02T06:30:00-04:00

This week was notable for its lack of coronavirus briefings, which have held us in their grip for more than a month. Once a source of pride, they were exposing President Donald Trump, he discovered finally, as a figure of fun. In their place, the White House arranged a series of well-orchestrated events for him, away from the pressroom. The method suggested a discipline and sobriety unseen from this administration since the pandemic began—since Inauguration Day 2017, for that matter. This week seemed (my fingers tremble to type the word) normal. At least as normal as can be mustered in these troublesome times.

Yet more than once, my mind, what’s left of it, went back to an anecdote involving George S. Kaufman, the great playwright of the 1920s and ’30s. He was talking with friends one evening backstage at a performance of his latest Broadway hit. The show starred the Marx Brothers, who were famous for their endless improvisations. Suddenly, Kaufman hushed his companions. “My God,” Kaufman said in shock, “I think I just heard something I wrote!”

Having long ago served as a speechwriter myself, that story returns during those delirious moments when I imagine the plight of Trump’s speechwriters. Putting words in the mouth of a man whose mouth already overflows with words of his own must make for a life of constant frustration. Consider Wednesday afternoon, when the president met in the White House with business executives to discuss the plan for “opening up America again.”

[Andrew Ferguson: Trump’s 5 o’clock follies]

I imagine the young speechwriters, their newly composed words now printed on the paper the president carries. They listen in remotely, from a speaker in their office across the street.

“Well, thank you very much, everybody,” the president says, by way of introduction. “A lot of progress is being made, as you see. And we’re reopening our country, and it’s very exciting.”

The speechwriters shrug at the modesty of their work. It’s not Churchill, but what the hell?

And then suddenly, without a pause: “And it should never have happened.”

Ten seconds into the prepared remarks and already I can see the startled speechwriters staring at the ceiling, or one another: What should never have happened?

“This plague should never have happened,” the president continues, his tone hardening. “It could have been stopped, but people chose not to stop it. It’s a very sad thing for the world—184 countries, at least.”

The writers glance hopelessly at their original text and drop their copies in the recycling bin, as the president resumes, in a lighter tone: “But it’s a great honor to have you with us, friends of mine.”

The idea that the pandemic should never have happened—and that some people chose not to stop it—was a theme on the presidential mind this week. But there were many themes, as there so often are with the president.

He had ended the week before on a sour note. At the close of his usual Friday coronavirus briefing, on April 24, he turned smartly on his heel and declined to receive any questions from the press. In the previous 24 hours, a torrent of mockery and abuse had rained down on him—how to describe it?—the likes of which the world had never seen before in human history. (Everybody knows it.) The cause of the ridicule, of course, was his musing on the uses to which disinfectant and UV rays might be put in retarding the coronavirus. The musing, you’ll recall, was unorthodox.

The mockery was vicious, even by the standards of the Trump era. But did it, for the first time, sting its target? We cannot know. Away from the pressroom, the president fired up his Twitter account. What poured out was his disgust not only for his mockers in the press but for the very idea of briefings, the venue that had enabled his own unfortunate improvisations.

[Tom Nichols: With each briefing, Trump is making us worse people]

“What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately,” he wrote. “Not worth the time & effort.”

Among the facts that the press had refused to report was the president’s newly discovered gift for sarcasm. Sarcasm, he insisted, had led him to his odd thoughts on the uses of Lysol and sunlight; it was another sarcastic joke, he said, when in a subsequent tweet he urged journalists who had won the “Noble prize” for their reporting on the “Russian hoax” to return it.

The rarity here was not that the president was lying about what he’d said and why he had said it. Anyone who watched the video of his original comments could see how earnest and hope-filled—how far from sarcasm—he was in pondering the wonders of disinfectant. The rarity was that he felt it necessary to explain himself after the fact. He seemed to be saying: I’m not stupid, and I know how to spell. I just have a sense of humor too sophisticated for the average reporter to grasp. Sarcasm! Sure, that’s the ticket.

Evidently, Trump and the people around him thought that at last it was time for something else. The president avoided the pressroom and surrounded himself throughout the week with CEOs, owners and employees of businesses large and small, and, one by one, friendly and appreciative governors (two of them Democrats!). The changes were immediately apparent. Trump’s demeanor was imperturbable; when he took press questions, he declined the bait of even the most provocative. His remarks, notwithstanding the unavoidable, Marxian improvisations, opened with expressions of mourning and condolence for the country’s loved and lost—expressions he has been weirdly reluctant to make in the past. His final White House event of the week was a moving display of ordinary citizens who have distinguished themselves with acts of charity in the midst of the pandemic.

Most unexpected of all, his newly minted press secretary, a future Fox News host named Kayleigh McEnany, gave what resembled a traditional press briefing—the first one in more than 100 days. She was direct and knowledgeable and friendly. Clouds seemed to part.

[Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real time]

Don’t misunderstand. No week of Trump-watching will lack for oddities. The sudden, dark self-interruptions—it should never have happened—were heard in every speech. The man who once declared “we’re doing health” when he hoped to replace the Affordable Care Act continued to speak in signature shorthand: Referring to Sweden, he said, “They’re going herd.” (The Swedes are hoping to achieve herd immunity.) On energy policy: “I’m all for green. But the green can’t power these massive factories.” (Can the orange?) The improvised incoherence, which can be almost charming if you’re in the right mood, still managed to be tone-deaf. His irrepressible egoism turns things upside down, and the optimism and boosterism he strains to convey curdle. “Our death totals,” he said Thursday, “our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong. We’re very proud of the job we’ve done.” U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

And yet no one should underestimate how unexpected the week was: a series of well-planned public events with dovetailed messages, expressions of empathy for the victims of national calamity, the appearance of an articulate and well-informed press agent to tease a string of rationality from her boss’s rambling, and even a boss who seemed to develop the unwonted skill of forcing himself to stop talking.

Was this all the result of a chastened Trump—a human Trump so bruised and battered by international mockery that he felt it necessary to take stock? An unreflective man moved at last to self-reflection, goaded by interior whispers of doubt in his own unerring instinct and wisdom?

If this is so, can we all of us, not only his speechwriters but civilians too, see a return in this time of crisis to a mode of national leadership that approaches (again the fingers tremble) the normal? Is such a thing possible?

Nah.

Trump’s 5 O’Clock Follies

2020-04-25T06:45:00-04:00

Well, I picked the wrong day to write a regular report on President Donald Trump’s White House coronavirus briefings. People always have big expectations for Fridays, which have traditionally been enjoyed as the gateway to the weekend, a day of pleasing anticipations. That was back when we had weekends.

Yesterday’s edition of the president’s briefing had a week of tough acts to follow. Wednesday’s brought us the remarkable self-abasement of Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was quoted in The Washington Post as saying, “There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” The interview obviously displeased the president very much. Therefore, Trump said, Redfield was “totally misquoted.”

In the pressroom on Wednesday afternoon, before the president could finish reading his usual introductory prepared remarks, he interrupted himself to call Redfield to the podium. The president stayed close to the CDC director, hovering just behind and slightly to his right, in the manner of a hostage video—with the difference being that the president, as we know, refuses to wear a mask. Redfield admitted to being totally misunderstood, if not totally misquoted, by the Post. “He was misquoted,” the president said again.

[Tom Nichols: With each briefing, Trump is making us worse people]

Then, in response to a reporter’s question, Redfield said, “I’m accurately quoted in The Washington Post.” He took his seat. The president looked satisfied, leaving us only to imagine the gruesome Oval Office struggle session that must have preceded the CDC director’s appearance in the pressroom.

The next day’s briefing, on Thursday, became an instant landmark in the history of presidential utterance. Instead of counseling “malice toward none” or warning against the “fear of fear itself,” as other—some would say lesser—presidents have done, President Trump let his mind wander over to how the coronavirus might be outfoxed on surfaces with disinfectant and UV rays from the sun. This time he was appearing with a scientist from the Department of Homeland Security who has been studying the subject.

Then Trump had an idea. (It happens.) “And then I said [presumably to the scientist], supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or [horrible pause] some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

The quote is a bit long to fit on the Trump memorial that—some would say—may one day adorn the National Mall, after the future President Bieber signs the authorizing legislation. But his words had tremendous power nonetheless, sending countless Americans to bed with nightmares of Clorox enemas. And dreams of sunlight too, of course. We’ve all known that President Trump was big on flattery, but it turns out that he really does want to blow sunshine up our ass.

Yesterday’s 5 o’clock briefing started around 5:40 and provided only anticlimax. Maybe the president knew better than to try to top himself. With the vice president and the head of the Food and Drug Administration joining in, Trump released a blizzard of numbers—most of them very happy numbers indeed: declines in new cases, for example, in New York and Louisiana.

Few public speakers reveal their disdain for prepared remarks more than our president; it might be a reflection of his well-known disdain for the written word. With a text in hand, written by some faceless factotum, Trump’s voice falls into a phlegmatic purr and his heavy-lidded eyes remain glued to the page. Only when he wants to throw in his own two cents does his voice take on the more familiar animated tone.

[Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real time]

I enjoy the obiter dicta much more than the recitation, partly for the mysterious questions they raise, partly for the mental chaos they suggest. “We ask every American to maintain vigilance in hygiene and social distancing and voluntary use of face coverings,” he read sleepily. “It’s exciting to see.” And then whoosh! Out flies the errant, incipient thought: “We have a lot of talent involved, from governors down to people that just stand there and help you with the doors.”

Suddenly the chasm opens up beneath our feet. Who are these helpful door people? Why did they enter the president’s brain at that moment? Could it be because he just walked through a door that one of these helpful people opened?

These are the moments, these are the questions, that keep us coming back to the president’s briefings—and that bring the sense of sorry deflation when he ends the briefings abruptly. Yesterday evening, after more encouraging numbers from the FDA chief and the vice president, along with more gratitude, graciously accepted, from both for the president’s visionary leadership, Trump gave out an unexpected thank you to the reporters, turned, stepped from the podium, and shuffled through an open door (aha!) back to his office.

There will be more briefings and, God willing, more reports. As for now, I am off to the CVS before it runs out of Clorox.

The Unclubbable Republican

2020-04-01T07:00:00-04:00

CM / CQ Roll Call / Getty

Updated at 2:15 p.m. ET on April 1, 2020.

Tom Coburn, the former Republican senator from Oklahoma, was a fanatic, and I mean that in the very best sense of the word. In 2003, when a reporter for his local newspaper said he wanted to write about the politician’s recent bout with cancer, Coburn scolded him: “You should be writing about Medicaid and Medicare instead of my health.”

Coburn finally succumbed to cancer last week; meanwhile, the object of his grandest obsession—the parlous financial condition of the federal government’s finances, including the funding of Medicaid and Medicare—survives him. Some of the send-offs in the press read more like character assassination than obituary. Fanatics are generally unloved and, for that reason, rare in mainstream politics, where a need to be admired is the entry-level qualification. The closest comparison to Coburn on the scene today is probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Just as a reporter who asked Coburn about his health would get an earful about Medicare-funding formulas, so a question about the price of coffee might provoke one of AOC’s fusillades on income inequality. For fanatics, it’s always first things first.

[Read: The Senate-stalling Republican no one hates]

The monomania made Coburn famously unclubbable, even in the supposedly collegial Senate, even among his fellow Republicans. He came to politics after two successful careers, one as a business owner, meeting payrolls and negotiating union contracts, and then, after graduating from medical school at age 35, as an obstetrician in his hometown of Muskogee. He estimated that he delivered more than 4,000 babies. He kept doing it, on weekends home, after he was elected to the House of Representatives and later the Senate.

Both houses of our national legislature are overrun by a certain human type: men and women whose careers began in the second grade with their first campaign for hall monitor and who have stayed the course ever since, not counting the occasional detour to law school. Not Coburn. “In any election,” he said, “you should vote for the candidate who will give up the most if they win.” Better, he meant, to send to Congress people whose work had given them some success in the tug and tussle of ordinary commercial life and who were willing to make a sacrifice in comfort and convenience. The ideal public servant would see a tour in the Washington sausage factory as a demotion.

Such an officeholder is less likely to serve parochial interests—and thereby, endless reelection—at the expense of the national interest. The conflict could be most clearly seen in his exfoliation of budget “earmarks,” a word and a practice that Coburn did more than anyone to make notorious. Earmarks, often inserted surreptitiously into unrelated bills, directed government money to pet projects that were otherwise unlikely to receive majority support.

The sneakiness of earmarks, their lack of accountability and transparency, was enough to make them objectionable. But in federal budgets where a little less than 25 percent of expenditures had already had to be borrowed—red ink by the barrel—the practice was a symptom of ill-discipline unbecoming a self-governing people. The classic of the genre was the “bridge to nowhere,” a pork-barrel project connecting one sparsely inhabited spit of Alaska to another, at a cost of $223 million.* The bridge, a simple line item in a large appropriations bill, was one of Coburn’s great discoveries. He and his staff had a rare gift for sifting through the agate type of budget documents without losing their eyesight or their minds. The shaming worked, the funding was removed—and then restored several years later. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

[Read: The great earmark ban wars]

Coburn redoubled his unpopularity with colleagues by becoming a master of legislative procedure. As a member of the House, he managed to grind the chamber to a halt by threatening to file 130 separate amendments to an agriculture bill, effectively inventing a one-man filibuster in a legislative body that forbids filibusters. (He said the bill was a sop to wealthy farmers and agribusiness.) After he was elected to the Senate, he kept a copy of Riddick’s Senate Procedure, a book of government rules, on his nightstand. Eventually his repeated raids on appropriations bills forced the Senate leadership to declare a moratorium on earmarks, after the Tea Party election of 2010 seemed to validate Coburn’s distaste for deficit spending.

[Read: Tom Coburn is retiring from the Senate]

In truth, as Coburn knew, earmarks have never amounted to more than a few percentage points of the federal budget. The drivers of the debt are the “entitlement” programs that alarmed him even more. Year after year he proposed reforms to slow their rate of growth, by raising the age at which people qualify for them or barring the well-to-do from collecting them. Yet earmarks, he said, were the “gateway drug” to a larger irresponsibility, a kind of self-dealing that would in the end corrode the discipline and good faith essential to representative government. Earmarks offended him especially when they were used to redistribute income in the wrong direction. One of his books is called Subsidies of the Rich and Famous, a comprehensive list of tax loopholes that amounted to “welfare for the well-off … paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate, many who are working two jobs to make ends meet, and IOUs to be paid off by future generations.”

His campaign against the tax loopholes pleased his fellow Republicans no more than they pleased Democrats. Both sides said he wanted to raise taxes. He drew the scorn of Washington’s professional conservatives, the veterans of the recently deceased conservative movement, who had come to town, as the phrase goes, to do good and stayed to do well.

The scorn was mutual. Most of the activists, he wrote in a memoir, “had no real-world experience. Their practical knowledge … was limited to deciding who spoke when at lunches and where to hold conferences.” He called himself the “opposition within the opposition.” Long experience, he said, had taught him that the “only thing more dangerous than negotiating with Democrats [is] negotiating with Republicans.” Establishment Republicans were especially scandalized when Barack Obama, asked to contribute to Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, chose Coburn, his friend and friendly adversary, as his subject. “Each of us still hopes the other will see the light,” Obama wrote.

Like lots of fanatics, Tom Coburn was at bottom a moralist. He was called “Dr. No,” and the nickname amused him, but the constant contrarianism of his “no” reflected an affirmative view of the proper relationship between the governed and their government. As a think-tank fellow and an author, he was still working on this ideal when he died, trying to imagine a future for the Republican Party when Donald Trump is no longer around.

“He wasn’t so much a Never Trumper as an After Trumper,” a friend says. When that day arrives, Republicans will miss Tom Coburn.

* An earlier version of this article misstated the cost of the "bridge to nowhere." It was $223 million, not $227 million.

Springtime for Introverts

2020-03-26T06:00:00-04:00

I am not usually one to see a glass as half full, especially when any idiot can see that it’s half empty, as it is right now. But the new quarantine regime that is forcing even the most outgoing person indoors does, to combine metaphors, gild the glass with a silver lining: It has relieved considerable pressure on the introvert community. The world has caught up with us at last.

I should point out, to strike a personal note, that I live alone; already I can hear you say to yourself, “There’s a big surprise.” When newscasters tell Americans that we are entering a “strange new way of life” or a “new normal,” or moving into “unfamiliar territory,” I know they’re not talking to me. I and millions like me have been trying to self-isolate for years. We are the hopeful practitioners of antisocial distancing.

[Read: The dos and don’ts of social distancing]

That February was the virus’s American debut is fitting, because many introverts were still recovering from the trauma of the end-of-year holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s. (Introverts recover slowly.) Each year from late November to early January, we are subjected to a period of unrelenting cheerfulness, with entreaties from our extrovert brothers and sisters to join the fun, come out of our shell, loosen up, party down, stop being such a fuddy-duddy.

Well, there is no party to join now, and if there were a party and the host, by definition an extrovert, was popular enough to attract more than nine guests, it would quickly be declared a public menace. All our lives, introverts have known there was something wrong with large parties. We just couldn’t quite put our finger on what it was, and even if we could, we would have probably kept it to ourselves. We now look prescient rather than merely neurotic.

Assuming, that is, people look at us at all. We usually go unnoticed by design. We are the people who spent the night of our senior prom working on an arts-and-crafts project, who whiled away weekends burrowed in the stacks at the college library, who later on preferred to eat alone at corner tables in restaurants with a book propped up on the salt shaker, ignoring the occasional puzzled or pitying glances from the extroverts at the bar.

[Read: All the cozy things keep me going]

Replace the restaurant corner table with a tub of takeout, eaten over the sink standing up, and you can see how everyone else’s new normal conforms to our old normal. I have never known an introvert who washed his or her hands fewer than a dozen times a day; it’s our version of calisthenics. Hugs, long a source of terror for us, are now generally understood to be as violent and unwelcome as decapitation. The elbow bump is a social greeting most introverts can live with, far superior anyway to the viral autobahn of the handshake. A brief, awkward wave at six paces would be best of all. Indeed, for a true introvert, any encounter closer than six feet constitutes foreplay.

Only recently has introversion been deemed a social force, thanks to the writer Susan Cain. She became an unofficial spokesperson, a very soft-spoken spokesperson, when she published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking a few years ago. As nonleader of a nonmovement, Cain replaced the late writer and memoirist Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. So deep was Florence’s introversion, she once told me, she had recently bought a used car on the condition that the seller remove every seat but the driver’s. “Now I’ll never have to give anybody a ride,” she said.

In truth, King was as much a misanthrope as an introvert; despite lots of overlap, the two are not the same. Cain speaks for the introvert qua introvert. Her book became a huge best seller with the aid of the internet, which allowed its target audience to buy as many copies as they wished without having to go to the store. Her theme was perhaps novel to some people, but not to us: This is the extroverts’ world; the introverts just live in it.

“Introversion,” Cain wrote, “is now [considered] a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” Her book was a catalog of the ways in which society is designed around the pleasures and benefits of the extroverted: open floor plans in the workplace, team-building exercises everywhere, office calendars that let the boss and co-workers track your every move. Our culture’s heroes on the screen or the athletic field are always extroverts, our weirdos and deviants invariably portrayed as introverts—that shy, retiring neighbor who always kept to himself until the cops got the idea to dig up his basement floor.

[Read: This is how the pandemic ends]

If Cain’s book, readable, clever, and popular as it is, was intended as a revolutionary manifesto, it largely failed. It is very difficult to coordinate an uprising of people who would rather not leave the house.

Now, though, the virus has done what a revolution never could: The social order has been upended, and extroverts find themselves living in the introverts’ world. How the outgoing, the world-beaters, the Good Time Charlies and Charlenes will react is anybody’s guest, but take it from one who knows: Introversion isn’t so terrible, even with the alternately sad and horrifying news that makes introversion a societal necessity, even a matter of life and death.

Consider: As Cain points out, the world’s most introverted country, Finland, is also the world’s happiest.

How introverted are the Finns? Here’s how: You can tell a Finn likes you if he’s looking at your shoes instead of his own.

That’s a joke the Finns tell on themselves! Just because people are introverted doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun. We just don’t want to overdo it, is all.

The College President Who Simply Won’t Raise Tuition

2020-03-05T08:00:00-05:00

Arinze Stanley

“I’ll tell you a funny story,” said Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University. It was the day before the first home football game of the season and he was sitting in his corner office, overlooking the postcard-perfect quad.

“So the cost of a year of undergraduate college at Purdue University, tuition and fees, is $9,992. I’m proud of that number.

“One day I’m looking at one of those college guides, and it said, ‘Tuition and fees: $10,002.’ I called up our people and said, ‘Lookit here, there’s a mistake. You got the wrong number.’ They said, ‘That’s not a mistake.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is. Believe me. I know.’ They went back and checked and they said, ‘No, that’s the right figure.’

“It just bugged me to death. Does Walmart have a special and price it at $10.02? I found out what happened. There’s a second installment on a preexisting gym fee that got tacked on. Ten dollars plus $9,992 equals $10,002.

“Next time I’m at the gym, I ask the guy who runs it, ‘How’s it going here?’ He said, ‘Membership’s up; we’re doing well, making a little profit.’ I thought, Okay, that’s all I needed to know. And the next meeting of the board of trustees, they repealed that fee.

“So now we’re back to $9,992,” he said. There was both self-deprecation and a note of triumph in his chuckle. “I don’t know why it bugged me so much, but it did.”

He may not know why, but I do, and so does everybody who’s followed Daniels in his nearly 20-year public career. He is notoriously tight with a dollar. Friends recall that as a beginning golfer, he played with a garden glove he already had instead of a store-bought, $3 golf glove. His parsimonious nature, when applied to public matters, is one reason he received more votes than any other officeholder in Indiana history in 2008, when he won reelection as governor, and it’s why he and his university—a 150-year-old land-grant school in West Lafayette, Indiana—are objects of curiosity and even wonderment in the world of higher education.

Most of the attention centers on that all-important number, 9,992. Not only is that the dollar amount an in-state student will pay Purdue for tuition and fees next year; it is also the amount such a student paid Purdue when Daniels became university president, in 2013. The university has also reduced the price of food services and textbooks. An undergraduate degree from Purdue, in other words, is less expensive today than it was when Daniels arrived.

Only when seen against the inflationary helix of American higher education can the singularity of this achievement be fully appreciated. The college-affordability crisis has become a staple of academic chin pulls, news stories, congressional hearings, and popular books written in tones of alarm and commiseration. From 2007 to 2017, the average annual cost of a degree at a four-year public university like Purdue rose from about $15,000 to more than $19,000—a jump of 28 percent after taking inflation into account. Only health care rivals higher education as an economic sector so consumed by irrational inefficiencies and runaway prices.

[Read: Why is college in America so expensive?]

The consequences are plain. Students and their parents have acquired debt totaling more than $1.5 trillion, more than all credit-card debt held in the U.S., and sufficiently large, according to the Federal Reserve, to be a drag on the economy. Roughly 70 percent of college students take out loans to finance their education. The average undergraduate leaves school more than $25,000 in debt.

At Purdue, by contrast, nearly 60 percent of undergrads leave school without any debt at all.

So how did Purdue do it?

“I always say it’s easier to explain what we didn’t do,” Daniels told me. “We didn’t try to get more money from the state. We didn’t shift from full-time faculty and fill the ranks with cheaper, part-time adjunct faculty. We haven’t driven up our percentage of international or out-of-state students,” who pay more than in-staters. Each of these measures has been taken up by other public universities, even as most have increased their in-state tuition.

Proud as he is of his number, Daniels worries that all the attention paid to the tuition freeze scants the improvements that the school says it has simultaneously made in educational quality and financial health.

Increased enrollment since the freeze has brought in an extra $100 million, reckons Chris Ruhl, the university’s treasurer and chief financial officer. The benefits of the improved balance sheet can be seen across campus. According to the university’s figures, Purdue’s full-time faculty at all levels has increased, resulting in a student-teacher ratio of 13 to 1, compared with the Big Ten average of more than 15 to 1. Faculty pay is up too. The salary of a full-time professor at Purdue has increased by 12 percent over the past five years, against a conference-average increase of 7 percent.

[Read: The scariest student loan number]

Meanwhile, a visitor can’t help but notice that large stretches of Purdue’s campus are construction sites: for new research facilities; new residence halls; a learning center the size of a power plant, which is what stood in its place until six years ago. Applications for admission are up 37 percent.

Tuition increases were once a fact of life at Purdue. The chair of the board of trustees, Michael Berghoff, recalls his first meeting as a trustee, more than a decade ago, during which the school’s annual tuition hike came up: “Most discussions were about how much, very little about whether it was necessary.”

A few years later, the board offered Daniels the presidency—a controversial choice, Berghoff told me, owing to Daniels’s lack of academic experience beyond his Princeton undergraduate degree and law degree from Georgetown. During his eight years as governor, Daniels had become famous for his penny-pinching, as he had in his previous job directing President George W. Bush’s budget office. Bush nicknamed him “The Blade.” On the day when representatives of government agencies came to pick up their copies of the annual federal budget, Daniels played the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” over the loudspeaker. As governor, in his effort to balance the budget and pile up a surplus, he devised a host of economizing measures, including printing all state documents in the narrowest font he could find to save on paper and ink. “No saving is too small to disregard,” he said then and says now.

So Berghoff wasn’t completely surprised when Daniels, at his first trustee meeting, floated the idea of a tuition freeze. “I thought it would be a one-off, just to send a message that we could break this long, long run of increases,” Daniels told me. “It turned out we could do it a second year, then the third. Then it became the thing we’re known for.”

[Read: Six-figure price tags are coming to colleges]

In Indianapolis, Daniels’s administration was known for selecting successful businesspeople and placing them across state government. He’s done the same at Purdue. Michael B. Cline, the former head of the state’s transportation department, is now running Purdue’s administrative operations, and Ruhl, the former state budget director, is now the university’s CFO and treasurer.

What they described to me could be a new model—a change in the culture—of finance in higher education, bringing market pressures to bear on processes that had never faced them before. Savings came, Daniels said, “from a couple of big things, and lots of little things.” Low-hanging fruit was plucked early: The residence halls, which housed young people who all owned cellphones, still used landlines, so they were quickly removed. Payroll, which incredibly was still using paper time sheets, was digitized. Food service was centralized.

Daniels also addressed complaints from students and faculty about the price of textbooks. After six months of weighing options, Purdue struck a deal with Amazon to provide textbooks, saving students 30 percent on average and more than $2 million in the first few years, according to the school. The arrangement lapsed recently, but Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar store is still on campus, and textbook costs remain lower than before.

And so a virtuous circle was established, according to Purdue and its president. The predictably flat tuition attracted more students, creating a larger student body that brought in increased revenue, which allowed for the hiring of more and higher-quality faculty, whose research the university could profitably license to the private sector, where alumni, delighted at the celebrated achievements of their alma mater, helped increase donations by 136 percent over six years, which in turn has helped keep the freeze in place.

While Daniels’s approach wins mostly praise on campus, David Sanders, a biological-sciences professor and frequent critic of Daniels’s policies, told me he hears quiet grumbles. “The freeze is a marvelous admissions marketing tool,” Sanders said. But the surge in enrollment “puts a lot of stresses on the city and the campus.” In his own department of biological sciences, despite the campuswide improvement in the student-teacher ratio, “introductory-class sizes are much larger,” requiring more students to monitor lectures remotely. And as resources get reallocated, “there’s far more competition between faculty and between departments,” he said. “The institution is less collegial.” (Most faculty members contacted for this story declined to comment.)

However widely these misgivings are shared, no one denies that the freeze and the other innovations have set Purdue in a new direction, one much more in keeping with Daniels’s brand of populism.

“When I got here,” he told me, “there was an effort to become the ‘Stanford of the Midwest,’ an elite institution along those lines,” which would have meant shrinking enrollment, cutting out kids at the low end of the class to skew the average toward the top.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Mitch Daniels urges graduates to resist tribalism]

Daniels speaks frequently of Purdue’s mission as a land-grant school, chartered under Civil War–era legislation that helped establish colleges devoted to teaching agriculture, engineering, and other practical arts to the children of prairie pioneers. “We were put here to democratize higher education,” he said.

The number of domestic undergraduate “underrepresented minorities” at Purdue (URMs, in the acronym-happy world of college admissions) grew from 2,483 in 2012 to 3,461 in 2019. Yet as the student body has also grown, the percentage of URMs among undergraduates has remained about 10 percent—while black and Latino students alone account for 36 percent of the U.S. college-age population.

Daniels expresses frustration at the relative lack of progress. A few years ago, he got the idea for the university to sponsor high schools in Indiana’s largest cities. “We realized we had to build our own pipeline if we wanted to recruit minorities and poor kids,” he said. “We couldn’t wait on the public high schools to catch up to us.” The original Purdue Polytechnic High School, in Indianapolis, will graduate its first class, of 115 kids, in 2021. “My dream is that we can slip a Purdue scholarship in with each diploma,” he said.

Even so, Daniels hasn’t escaped the controversies that attend diversity issues in higher education. Last November, Purdue’s student newspaper released audio of Daniels discussing faculty hiring with a group of mostly minority students. “At the end of this week,” he told them, “I’ll be recruiting one of the rarest creatures in America—a leading, I mean a really leading, African American scholar.”

Social media erupted. The hashtag #IAmNOTACreature took off on Twitter. D’Yan Berry, the president of Purdue’s Black Student Union, wrote that she was “disappointed but not at all surprised by his reference … to Black students as creatures. It afflicts me that this is how he speaks even when ‘boasting’ on students.”

After complaining that his figure of speech had been misinterpreted, Daniels took two weeks to issue an apology. “The word in question was ill chosen and imprecise and, in retrospect, too capable of being misunderstood,” Daniels wrote. “I accept accountability for the poor judgment involved.”

Beyond the new Purdue-run high schools, the other great populist initiative of Daniels’s tenure—and perhaps the most controversial—is the purchase, for $1, of the for-profit, mostly online Kaplan University, from the Washington, D.C., businessman Donald Graham, in 2017. Overnight, Purdue Global, as it’s now called, brought approximately 30,000 online students, most of them part-time, into Purdue’s orbit and made the school one of the largest online educators in higher ed.

Daniels had long thought that online education would be crucial to expanding the school’s mission of accessibility, but the idea of building the infrastructure from scratch was daunting. The purchase of Kaplan U solved the problem. Kaplan—best known for its test-prep service—continues to provide back-end and marketing services for Purdue Global in return for a percentage of revenue.

Daniels presented the Kaplan deal to the Purdue community as a fait accompli; the trustees quickly approved it. Reaction ranged from surprise to puzzlement to deep skepticism. Foremost was the worry about commingling the operations of a public university with a for-profit business. “It’s an attempt to inject free-market principles into public education,” says Bill Mullen, an American-studies professor. It’s “a way of blurring the lines between public and private. There’s less of an appreciation for higher education as a public good.”

[Read: Purdue University income-share agreements could solve debt crisis]

But Daniels appears unfazed by the criticism, and the larger Purdue community seems quite happy with the way the institution has grown in size and reputation. As it happens, Graham visited the campus last September, and we tagged along as Daniels snaked his way through the stadium parking lot, choked with tailgaters fussing over grills the size of Ping-Pong tables. Young and old greeted him like a rock star—a short, balding rock star. No one called him by his title or his last name. Mitch!

A grill master in a Purdue apron, Purdue sweatshirt, and Purdue cap saw me scribbling and offered a comment. His name was Chuck, he said. He was from Greencastle, and his two kids had gone to Purdue. “This man here,” he said, pointing at Daniels, who was grinning for an endless line of selfies, “saved me thousands of dollars.”

By the time we had crossed the parking lot, half an hour later, Don Graham was beaming from his trip through the delighted scrum of parents and students and alumni.

“These people love you, Mitch!”

Daniels shrugged but was clearly pleased.

“Well,” he said, “they know it’s reciprocated.”

This article appears in the April 2020 print edition with the headline “Tight With a Dollar.”

Trump’s Beautiful Proposal for Federal Architecture

2020-02-20T06:30:00-05:00

I hope members of the National Civic Art Society are just perverse enough to be rather pleased with themselves right about now. The NCAS is the group of activists behind the draft executive order informally called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The draft, which was leaked earlier this month to an architecture trade publication, strongly encouraged architects to adopt a classical style when they design federal courthouses and buildings in the nation’s capital. The Trumpian title of the order was itself a mischievous provocation, and the name hit the bull’s-eye.

The White House declined to say whether President Trump would sign the order or had even seen it. Yet the draft touched off panic attacks and furious denunciations from every corner of what is rightly termed the architecture establishment—a powerful agglutination of critics, urban planners, civil servants, reporters, publicists, corporate consultants, academics, and even some architects.

[Amanda Kolson Hurley: Trump’s bizarre plan to make architecture classical again]

The denunciations were not a surprise, and neither was their unvarying line of argument and abuse: The critics called the NCAS and its leaders extremists, Nazis, white supremacists, and—this one must have really hurt—Republicans.

As in so many cultural disputes today, the debate over the draft order cuts deep, all the way down to first premises. The two sides use different languages to talk past each other (though only one side is calling the other Nazis). The classicists behind the draft order hope to address a problem that the architecture establishment does not see as a problem. The nonproblem problem is this: After World War II, the federal government adopted modernism in its many variations as a kind of house architectural style, and as a consequence has managed to build a very large number of unlovely buildings.

The J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I Building in Washington, D.C. (Joyce Naltchayan / AFP via Getty)

Many of these structures now scar the otherwise classically designed streetscape of Washington, D.C. They include such infamous examples as the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building, which is even more obnoxious than its namesake, along with the Hubert H. Humphrey Health and Human Services Building and the former Housing and Urban Development headquarters, which one former employee deathlessly described as “ten floors of basement.” The government has extended the reach of its bad taste beyond the capital and into the provinces, with federal courthouses that don’t embody the law’s majesty but instead express contempt for ordinary taste or, just as often, advertise the architect’s cleverness.

Why is this a problem? Willful, preventable ugliness is always a problem to one degree or another. Here the ugliness involves the self-conscious repudiation of commonly accepted notions of proportion, accessibility, appropriateness, and coherence. The problem doubles when the ugliness is created by government agencies spending the public’s money while in thrall to a special interest like the architecture establishment—in this case, the architects who design the government’s buildings, the critics who praise them, the academics who try to explain them, the trade associations that drape them in awards, and the wealthy civic boosters who like showing up for the ribbon cutting. Everyone wins except for the people who have to visit, work in, pay for, and look at the result.

The Seagram Building in New York. (Independent Picture Service / Getty)

To supporters of the draft order, the solution to this problem is simple: The way to get people to stop constructing ugly public buildings with government money is to insist that they use government money to design handsome buildings instead. Great buildings, like great architects, are rare, but certain styles of architecture lend themselves to a higher level of tolerable mediocrity than others. In the now defunct International Style, for instance, there is a vertiginous drop-off in quality between the Seagram Building, which shows the style at its dazzling zenith, and the scores of hurried, ill-proportioned Seagram wannabes that have pockmarked the downtowns of every midsize American city since the early 1970s.

Supporters of the proposed executive order believe that classical architecture is closer to being idiot-proof. The style is much more likely to result in pleasing buildings, even when designed by less-than-first-rate practitioners. On his worst day—hungover, kids sick, car in the shop, wife not speaking to him—the least talented classical architect is unlikely to produce anything quite as forbidding and hostile to human life as, let’s say, the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall.

Classicism is also much more likely than the Hirshhorn’s brutalism or other postwar styles to produce a building admired by the public—the people who are, we shouldn’t forget, not merely the consumers but also the financial backers of government buildings. Although no truly definitive measures of the public’s taste in architecture exist, the American Institute of Architects conducted the closest thing to an authoritative poll of laymen in 2007. In the list of “150 favorite pieces of American architecture,” modernist buildings fared poorly; another 70 or so modern buildings that respondents considered didn’t crack the list at all. It’s safe to say public taste runs toward the traditional.

The larger purpose of the draft order is to enlist this popular preference in a project of civic renewal. “New Federal building designs,” the text reads, “should … inspire the public for their aesthetics [and] make Americans feel proud of our public buildings … Classical and traditional architectural styles have proven their ability to inspire such respect for our system of self-government.”

A couple of ironies are unmistakable here. Few public figures in memory have done more to demean the dignity and encourage the disrespect of government than Trump; signing the order would be at least a small gesture toward remediation. Meanwhile, the architecture establishment, which, like nearly all cultural organs, is squarely on the political left, might be expected to support a project meant to restore the public’s faith in “the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability” of the federal government. (The quote is from the draft order, which in turn is quoting an older, largely ignored set of federal guidelines.) Isn’t an enterprising and vigorous government a progressive ideal? In the Trump era everybody is changing places.

[Read: Trump once proposed building a castle on Madison Avenue]

One can legitimately argue with the order, beginning with the fact of the order itself. Even some traditionalists see unilateral executive action as a thick-fingered means to achieve the admirable goal of a more humane and welcoming built environment. Trump’s critics, who tend to see him as Il Duce with hair, go much further. The general accusation is that the proposed order is another sign of incipient fascism—“one of the most blatantly authoritarian things the government has yet attempted,” says Wired. The charge has grown ragged from overuse. More than half a century ago, the writer Jean-François Revel wondered why the dark night of fascism was always falling in the U.S. and yet lands only in Europe.

Not all the criticism has been supercharged. Many of the craftier critics assume a kind of eye-rolling world weariness: The debate between traditional and contemporary architecture is so … so … 1980s. I mean, Gawd. The NCAS and its supporters are living in the past, all right—not the Renaissance, but the Reagan era, when the neoclassical backlash against modernism seemed fresh. “Just to have this argument feels demeaning,” wrote the architecture critic for The New York Times. The order raises "issues most people simply don't argue about anymore," wrote The Washington Post's architecture critic. This debate, wrote a critic for New York magazine, “doesn’t really exist.”

Well, the debate looks pretty lively from here, if a bit one-sided. I think what the critics mean is that they thought this debate was over—and that the people who believe as they do had swept the field and sown it with salt so that no dissent could sprout again, ever. Then this little band of Trumpian pip-squeaks piped up with their draft order. The critics react to this brazen insolence much as the father in the Ring Lardner story responds to his talky, precocious child: “Shut up, he explained.”

Perhaps the frustration of the draft’s critics accounts for the misrepresentations and overstatements about what the order would actually do. The American Institute of Architects, in its statement, called it “one-size-fits-all”; The Dallas Morning News said, “The state [is] imposing its will on the creative freedom of its citizens.”

Anytime the government hires someone to do a job—even an architect—it imposes its will and limits his or her freedom. That’s one advantage to being an employer. Even so, the imposition in this case is limited. The draft reads: “Architectural styles—with special regard for the classical architectural style—that value beauty, respect regional architectural heritage, and command admiration by the public are the preferred styles for applicable Federal buildings.” Other styles, such as the Mediterranean, the Spanish colonial, the Romanesque, and the Gothic, are explicitly encouraged, with latitude left for other styles to be used under “extenuating” circumstances. Only two styles, brutalism and deconstructivism, are excluded for federal buildings.

That’s a pretty big tent. Would the AIA and the other critics want the government to hire architects that don’t value beauty, ignore local heritage, and give the public the high hat?

Come to think of it, that’s what the government has been doing for more than 70 years.

No one knows whether Trump will care enough to read the draft, much less sign it. From the evidence of his buildings, Trump’s taste in architecture runs toward a gaudy modernism, far removed from the restrained and tasteful traditionalism that the order promotes. If he signs it, he will do so for one of two reasons: (1) He truly believes it will elevate the quality of federal architecture and thereby the general level of citizenship. (2) He doesn’t care one way or the other but knows it will send his enemies right around the bend.

I’m betting on No. 2. And they don’t have far to go.

Abraham Lincoln’s Radical Moderation

2020-02-15T08:00:00-05:00

Cecilia Carlstedt

In the opening days of the Civil War, long before Saturday Night Live appropriated the idea, Louis Trezevant Wigfall earned the distinction in Washington, D.C., of being the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave. Elected to the United States Senate from Texas to fill a vacancy in 1859, Wigfall wasted no time in making himself obnoxious to his colleagues and the public alike. He was lavish in his disdain for the legislative body in which he had sought a seat. On the Senate floor, he said of the flag and, especially, the Union for which it stood, “It should be torn down and trampled upon.” As the southern states broke away, Wigfall gleefully announced, “The federal government is dead. The only question is whether we will give it a decent, peaceable, Protestant burial.”

By then Wigfall had been appointed to the Confederate congress, and the only question that occurred to many of his colleagues was why he was still bloviating from the floor of the U.S. Senate. Wigfall was worse than a mere gasbag. As Fergus M. Bordewich points out in his provocative new book, Congress at War, he “passed on military information to his southern friends, bought arms for the Confederacy, and swaggered around encouraging men to enlist in the secessionist forces.” At last, in March 1861, Wigfall quit the U.S. capital and showed up a few weeks later in South Carolina. Commandeering a skiff after Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, he rowed out to present terms for the fort’s surrender. He had no authorization to do such a thing; he was simply following his passion to make trouble and get attention. He went down in history as a triple threat: a traitor, a blowhard, and a shameless buttinsky.

[From April 1861: A Connecticut Yankee visits Charleston during the Fort Sumter standoff]

Wigfall, one of the many strange and colorful characters tossed up by the politics of the Civil War, typifies the time in important respects. The years leading to the Civil War, and the war itself, were political intensifiers; radicalism was rewarded and could be made to pay. This was as true of the Republican reformers who are the heroes of Bordewich’s book as it is of secessionists like Wigfall.

Bordewich’s ungainly subtitle—How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America—telegraphs the grand claims he sets out to make for a group of congressmen who mostly styled themselves as Radical Republicans. In his account, it is they who pressed for aggressive military campaigns when the will for war flagged among Abraham Lincoln’s generals; who invented the financial mechanisms that funded the war; who pushed for punitive measures against the southern slaveholders; and who deserve credit (or blame!) for the birth of big government—achievements more commonly attributed to their far less radical president. A popular historian and journalist blessedly free of academic affiliations, Bordewich is a master of the character sketch, summarizing complicated figures in a few swift phrases. But Lincoln himself never comes alive in his pages. Indeed, he scarcely appears. He lurks just offstage, stepping forward now and then to try, briefly and usually without success, to stymie the righteous zeal that propels the Radicals. The last line of the book declares that “a whole generation of politically heroic Republicans … led Congress to victory in the Civil War.” It’s an odd formulation—you probably thought the North won the war.

[From June 1865: The place of Abraham Lincoln in history]

Bordewich has chosen to tell his sprawling story of legislative activism and ascendancy mainly through four members of Congress: Senators Benjamin Wade of Ohio and William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, and Representatives Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. Vallandigham is the only Democrat, a leader of an anti-war faction whose preference for the Union was complicated by his pro-slavery sympathies. The rest are Republicans, and two of them, Stevens and Wade, proudly called themselves Radicals and behaved accordingly. Fessenden, at one time a conservative, grew more sympathetic to the Radicals’ aims as the war dragged on.

Congressional power fell in the lap of Republicans, thanks to the departure of Wigfall and his southern colleagues; their seizing of it seems, in retrospect, less a matter of superior gamesmanship than a law of political gravity. Calling for stronger prosecution of the war, immediate liberation of the enslaved, and confiscation of all property owned by the southern belligerents, Radicals quickly took control of the Republican caucus. Perhaps, Bordewich writes, the Radicals “have something to teach us about how our government can function at its best in challenging times, and how crisis may even make it stronger.” Lesson No. 1: Get most of your opponents to leave town before you try anything.

The Radicals were quick on their feet, exploiting national turmoil to break a legislative logjam. For decades Southern Democrats, their numbers swollen by the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause, had blocked a series of domestic programs proposed first by the Whigs and then by their Republican successors. Here was the chance to neutralize the Democratic aversion to centralized power and advance a collectivist vision of the commercial republic, laying the foundation, Bordewich writes, “for the strong activist central government that came fully into being in the twentieth century.”

The flurry of legislating was indeed “transformative,” as Bordewich says. He points in particular to four pieces of legislation as landmarks. The Homestead Act promised 160 acres of federal land to any citizen willing to live on it and farm it for five years. The Pacific Railway Act financed the transcontinental railroad and further opened up the western territories to white settlement. The third bill created the federal Department of Agriculture. And the Morrill Land Grant College Act would distribute federal land to states and localities for the purpose of building public institutions of higher learning dedicated to teaching agriculture and other practical arts—a miracle of democratization in the history of American education.

Yet in Bordewich’s telling, Lincoln had little to do with the ambitious measures, as if the bills were signed by autopen during coffee breaks. In fact, two of them were explicitly endorsed in the Republican platform that Lincoln ran on in 1860; he made a special plea for the Department of Agriculture in his first annual message to Congress. Bordewich also downplays the inevitable unintended consequences that accompany government expansion, even what seem to be the most benign reforms. The railway act, with its crony capitalism and funny-money bond issues, led straight to the Gilded Age and the creation of half a dozen robber-baron fortunes. Those “federal lands” that Washington gave away in the railway and homestead acts were not, except in the sneakiest sense, the federal government’s to give away; the land rush they touched off may have guaranteed the otherwise merely predictable genocide of the Native Americans already living there.

In the name of designating the Radicals as the forerunners of contemporary liberalism, Bordewich tries to draw a continuous line from the Civil War Congress to the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet the line has too many zigs and zags and ups and downs to clinch a causal connection. And in fact, many of the features of big government (19th-century style) fell away before long. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, 60 years after the Civil War and a few years before the New Deal, oversaw a federal government that was in most respects closer in size and scope to the antebellum government than to the modern state that was soon to emerge.

[From July/August 2009: Christopher Hitchens on Lincoln’s emancipation]

If Bordewich oversells the legacy of the Radicals in Congress, his more fundamental misapprehension lies elsewhere: His version of events shortchanges the greatness that humanists of all stripes—not only historians—have found in Lincoln. The problem is partly a failure to appreciate that the Radicals were kibitzers, as many legislators are. But misjudging Lincoln’s role as executive and his commitment to larger obligations is Bordewich’s more telling mistake. Lincoln the executive shouldered the responsibility to lead an entire government and, just as important, an unstable political coalition. From Radicals to reactionaries, Republicans were held together by a single strand: a hostility, varying in degree, to slavery. A collapse of this delicate alliance—brought on by a sudden call for immediate, nationwide abolition, for instance—would have doomed the war effort.

Lincoln was required to be more cautious than a Radical congressman had to be—more serious, in a word. Bordewich credits the Radicals with forcing Lincoln year by year to pursue the war more savagely, culminating in the elevation of General Ulysses S. Grant in 1864. But his evidence is thin that Lincoln paid anything more than lip service to the Radicals’ pleas for bloodshed. Bordewich is a particular admirer of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War—“this improvised vigilante committee,” Lincoln called it, “to watch my movements and keep me straight.” It was put together by Benjamin Wade and stocked with his fellow Radicals.

The committee researched and rushed into print massive reports after failed and sometimes catastrophic military engagements. The accounts totaled millions of words and accused officers and bureaucrats of horrifying lapses in military judgment and execution. Some of the accusations were implausible; others were all too real. Historically, the reports are invaluable. At the time, however, their primary effect was to second-guess generals disliked by the committee’s majority and to advance the generals with whom the majority was politically aligned. The committee’s “greatest purpose,” Lincoln told a friend, “seems to be to hamper my action and obstruct military operations.”

Shelby Foote, in his history of the Civil War, tells a story that illustrates why Lincoln and the Radicals were destined to be so often at odds. One evening Wade rushed to the White House to demand that Lincoln fire a weak-willed general who had failed to press the Union advantage. Lincoln asked Wade whom he should enlist to take the general’s place. “Anybody!” Wade cried. “Anybody will do for you,” Lincoln replied, “but I must have somebody.” Lincoln had to be serious.

As Bordewich concedes, the Radicals were as bloody-minded as the Wigfalls of the world. “Nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce [southern rebels] to surrender,” Stevens once said, in a speech Bordewich doesn’t quote. There can, of course, be no moral equivalence between Stevens and a slavery apologist like Wigfall. One of them was on the side of the angels, and it wasn’t Wigfall. But both were radicals.

Radicalism is more than a packet of views or policies. The contents of the packet will change with circumstances and over time. (One reason Bordewich admires the Radical Republicans is that their views on race are so close to current mainstream attitudes; today’s radicals, valorizing group identity above all else, will likely find both the views and the politicians who held them hopelessly retrograde.) Radicalism is a disposition. The same is true of its contrary, moderation. Lincoln’s moderation was so infuriating to the Radicals because it reflected a hierarchy of values different from theirs.

The ultimate concerns for Stevens and his fellows were the liberation of the enslaved, the punishment of the enslavers, and the reorganization of southern society. The ultimate concern for Lincoln was the survival of the Union, to which he had an almost mystical attachment. The old question—was the war fought to preserve the Union or to free the slaves?—underestimates how closely the two causes were entwined in his mind. Lincoln’s goal was to uphold the kind of government under which slavery could not in the end survive. This was a government, as Lincoln said, dedicated to a proposition.

[From September 1999: Lincoln’s greatest speech]

In a hectoring letter written at a low point in 1863, a Radical senator insisted that Lincoln “stand firm” against conservatives in his government. It was a common complaint of the Radical Republicans that Lincoln was hesitant, easily led, timid—weak. “I hope to ‘stand firm’ enough to not go backward,” Lincoln replied, “and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.” Lincoln struck this balance with unmatched skill and sensitivity.

It was a feat of leadership peculiar to self-government, captured most famously by the only 19th-century American who could rival him as a prose artist and a statesman. Frederick Douglass was an enthusiastic admirer of Lincoln, once calling him, not long after the assassination, “emphatically the black man’s president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men.” Years later, Douglass’s enthusiasm had cooled—and ripened.

[From December 1866: Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction]

Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” Douglass now said. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground”—the ground, that is, from which Bordewich and many of today’s historians want to judge him, and the ground from which the Radicals did judge him—“Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent.” Douglass knew, though, that Lincoln never claimed to govern as an abolitionist, and Douglass knew why. “But measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

The italics are mine, but the insight belongs to Douglass. Lincoln was radical without being a Radical—and never more radical than a leader can afford to be when he leads a government of, by, and for the people.

Iowa Forgot the Whole Point of the Caucus

2020-02-04T16:09:00-05:00

Quirky is the word overworked reporters and analysts invariably reach for when they’re trying to describe the Iowa caucus, one of the last great anachronisms of American politics. How’s this for quirky? What got Iowa in trouble—to the point where many party poo-bahs are now calling for the death of the caucus tradition altogether—is that it was trying to stop being Iowa, by deploying an untested app in a misbegotten attempt to rationalize itself. Trying not to be quirky, in other words, Iowa seized up with a bigger quirk than anyone could have foretold.

In a pleasant irony, the origins of the Iowa caucus, like its now-probable demise, lie in technological ineptitude. In 1968, the Democratic National Convention was nearly upended by violent protests outside the hall and floor challenges within. After that debacle, reformers seized control of the party machinery from bosses like Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago. They aimed to make the large-D Democratic presidential-nominating process more small-d democratic. A national commission decreed that state conventions would henceforth be supplemented by grassroots meetings—caucuses, for example—where the rank and file could express their preferences.

[Read: Chaos at the caucus]

The Iowa state party had already scheduled its 1972 convention for June. Yet the group ran into a logistical issue. "Part of the problem was slow printers," Ron Masters, a former party chairman of Cerro Gordo County, once told the Mason City, Iowa, Globe Gazette.* "With all the new rules, in order to get everything printed and distributed before the convention, it was necessary to move up the caucus date." Just imagine: A better, more technologically advanced system for circulating information—a couple hundred more mimeograph machines, even—would have allowed Iowans to caucus later in the year, closer to their convention. And they would have missed their rendezvous with history.

Instead, the caucus was set for January. The change caught the attention of Gary Hart, the future senator and presidential candidate who was then the honcho of George McGovern’s long-shot campaign. Iowa, Hart noticed, would be the site of the first votes cast in the 1972 election season. Hart promoted Iowa as a novelty to national reporters. Our present monstrosity of political scribblers and analysts was just beginning to form, and then, as now, they were desperate for any raw numbers that could justify their new nonstop, year-round obsession with presidential campaigns.

Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus provided numbers for the reporters to crunch—and a bit of drama, too, as McGovern finished unexpectedly close behind the front-runner, Ed Muskie. Within weeks the underperforming Muskie had dropped out. McGovern went on to win the nomination. A few months later, Richard Nixon creamed him in the general election.

Iowa had come through with data, hard numbers, and narrative excitement, not to mention a steady stream of colorful locals sipping coffee and waiting to be quoted in the state’s seemingly bottomless supply of donut shops. The caucus became indispensable to feeding the vast carbuncle of professional consultants, advertising hacks, traveling press, social scientists, candidates, subalterns, and foot soldiers who have developed around our way of choosing presidents.

[David A. Graham: Why the Iowa caucus birthed a thousand conspiracy theories]

Otherwise meaningless—and quirky!—events like the Ames straw poll and the Iowa State Fair took on large political significance and then, in time, began to lose their luster from overfamiliarity. When you’ve written one feature on the state fair’s Butter Cow, you’ve written them all, and a single bite of a fried Twinkie is one bite too many. For years now, grumbling about the caucus from the professional political ranks has been as loud as the more traditional sighs of charmed admiration toward the rustics. Iowa is too white, we’re told, too rural. Who but an Iowan gives a damn about ethanol? Voters who care enough about presidential politics to arrange child care and to gas up the car to drive a half hour to the middle-school gym and hang out for a couple hours on a work night are not, it’s commonly said, representative of Democratic voters, and hence meaningless as indicators of party sentiment.

I will let Democrats decide whether they want to let stand this subtle disparagement of their most dedicated party members. The criticism is misguided in any case. Anyone who wants to pursue perfect political representativeness in a given population is on a fool’s errand. By some measures, the most representative state in the country is Illinois. Trust me: The donuts are better and more plentiful in Iowa.

Still, there’s no denying that the Iowa caucus, as it has grown in pointless complexity, is an offense against logic, an insult to our great god, efficiency. Iowans have taken many of the criticisms to heart over the past few elections and tried to iron out many of their inefficiencies, modernize the anachronisms through technology and other means. That Iowa’s political undoing might be caused by an effort to deny its fundamental character is a much less pleasant irony. Connoisseurs of inefficiency will be sorry to see the caucus go, if go it must.

*An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Globe Gazette. It's Mason City, not Mason.

Historians Should Stay Out of Politics

2019-12-21T06:00:00-05:00

I signed a petition once, in a professional capacity, and regretted it straightaway. This was during the last election. Someone who knew that I despised Donald Trump as a public figure—I don’t know him as anything else—gave my name to another acquaintance, and presto: Suddenly I was being asked to lend my nonexistent prestige to the cause of Republican writers against Trump.

I can hear you now: Republican writers against Trump? What broom closet did you hold your convention in? Wise guy.

As it happened, there were more than a few of us—not much more, but more—and the thing appeared in due time on the web and, so I was told, in actual print somewhere too. As you read the self-consciously noble words you could see the nostrils flare of the men and women who’d written it, these Republican writers against Trump, so deep was their revulsion, so pure was their outrage, so desperate was their desire to separate themselves from the Republican dolts who were going to vote for their party’s nominee. To this clarion and passionate eloquence, the world, the entire English-speaking world, paid no attention whatsoever. Before long I felt ashamed and embarrassed, having thrust my name into political activism, attached to words I hadn’t written, and strutted across a stage I had no business being on, wagging my fanny in front of no one who cared.

Why was I so chagrined? A spasm of self-importance creates a terrible hangover. I have been alive many decades, and my memory is that no one, outside family members and close friends, has ever expressed the slightest interest in which presidential candidate got my vote, and I’m certain that no one had ever solicited that information from me in order to make his own decision on the subject. I should have taken this as a hint: No one cares whom I vote for.

Having taken a painful inventory of my own motives, I now know that people sign such ridiculous documents for a narrow set of reasons. As a scribbler of the third or fourth tier, far down the ranks in fame and income, I think I rather enjoyed seeing my name listed up there among writers who were genuinely accomplished and, not to put too fine a point on it, rich. I’d been invited to an A-list party! Worse, I wanted the world to know that I, too, despised Donald Trump as much as any other enlightened person. And I do—I despise Donald Trump. I want that to be clear. Have I mentioned this already? Cannot abide the man.

[Read: Can honest history allow for hope?]

Anyway, it was an act equal parts self-aggrandizement and moral preening, and I’m not proud of it, and I wouldn’t mention it now except for a petition that crossed my line of sight the other day: “Historians’ Statement on the Impeachment of President Trump.” It appeared a few days before the House of Representatives went ahead and impeached Trump, and Nancy Pelosi even cited it in her own remarks on the House floor. Though impeachment is accomplished, the petition lives on, still collecting signatures. By now it has the endorsement of more than 1,500 people who identify themselves as historians, most of them professors of one rank or another, at universities of various reputation.

The thesis of the petition goes like this: “President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president.”

When I first read the statement, I took that superfluous adverb, precisely, as a bad sign. No one knows precisely what the Framers had in mind when it comes to impeachable offenses, and if we did, we could be sure it didn’t involve transcontinental telephone calls, gaga theories about computer servers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, or the sovereign nation of Ukraine, none of which existed when the Framers were framing away. Trump’s abuses and the kinds of violations the Framers thought were impeachable may bear a general similarity, or fall into the same general category, but that’s a different matter. Precision, we see early on, is precisely what the historians are not after.

The sloppiness is important because the whole statement is supposed to be self-validating. It is a reflexive form of what logic-choppers call an argumentum ab auctoritate, or argument from authority. The idea is to prove a disputed claim by pointing out that some expert or other authority believes the claim to be true. It’s a bogus but very popular trick. Trump loves it, and uses it more adamantly the more outlandish his assertions get. The authority he cites most often is “everybody.” “Many, many dogs can be taught to play poker,” he will yell to reporters on the White House lawn, his hand slicing the air as a waiting helicopter whirrs away. “Everybody knows it.” The historians are not much more reassuring. Their authority for their statement is them.

And this should be enough for the rest of us, goes the implication. The instigator of the petition is a Princeton historian named Sean Wilentz, who speaks with a self-asserted authority that’s best described as papal. Impeachments move him to declaim ex cathedra, like Pius IX pondering the Immaculate Conception. In 1998, he got up another petition of historians—roughly 400 of them; this was before Ph.D. inflation really took off—who told members of the House not to impeach President Bill Clinton. Wilentz even appeared before a House committee and announced that if a majority voted for impeachment, “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” (Bet he’s a tough grader.)

Well, that was then. The present statement, Wilentz told The New York Times the other day, is “a kind of petition to the public.” Historians, he said, “have a civic role, as keepers in some ways of the nation’s heritage, as people who have devoted our lives to studying this country.” The Times helpfully cited three of the heritage keepers who were among the early signers of the petition: Ron Chernow (author of Washington: A Life), Ken Burns (The Civil War, etc., etc.), and Robert Caro (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, four volumes and counting).

[Read: Why (some) historians should be pundits]

You’ll notice that none of these three holds a full-time university position as a professor of history. They are incidental historians—Burns is a filmmaker who prefers historical topics; Chernow and Caro are journalists and writers who have fallen into the vocation of writing popular biography. But they are famous and rich, and I of all people should understand the bandwagon effect such company generates. Scrolling through the endless list of obscure signatories from backwater colleges scattered between the coasts, I could just imagine them running home that evening to humblebrag to their wives or husbands, girlfriends or boyfriends: “Yeah, me and Bob Caro, we just figure enough is enough—impeach the bastard!”

The lasting question the petition raises is: “So what?” Put another way: “Should we care what these historians think about Trump’s impeachment?” In important ways the petition is as predictable as Halley’s Comet. Historians, no less than other academics, are deeply resentful of the public’s lack of interest in what they do, and understandably lunge at a turn in the popular spotlight. And the profession itself, like all the humanities, is ideologically monochromatic. Surveys show that the percentage of academic historians who say they’re Republicans ranges between 4 and 8 percent. If we set aside Hillsdale College, Bob Jones University, Thomas Aquinas College, and a couple of others, the more accurate percentage is probably half that. We can’t know how many within the other 98 percent consider themselves Democrats first and historians second. We can guess that many of them ache to think of themselves as “keepers of the nation’s heritage.” Not necessarily an authoritative bunch.

Historians claim expertise about the past; Trump’s impeachment is of the present. The study of history is crucial to a well-rounded intellect, it’s true, but neither a cultivated intellect nor a knowledge of history is a replacement for good judgment, which is what politics calls for. The whole democratic enchilada rests on the assumption that when it comes to prudential matters of public importance, the view of the stevedore is as valuable as that of the Princeton professor.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this category mistake used to advance a partisan purpose. In the 1980s, leftish nuclear physicists enjoyed great praise and attention for their petitions in favor of unilateral disarmament—as if knowing how to build a bomb was the same as knowing whether it should be used. A decade ago, many medical doctors signed petitions telling the rest of us that harvesting human stem cells for research was just fine—trying to shut down an argument over morality and metaphysics far beyond the scope of their medical training.

If I want to understand the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, Sean Wilentz will be my go-to guy, I promise. But Trump’s impeachment, and contemporary politics in general? Nah. My TV went on the blink last week, but I didn’t call Amy Poehler to fix it just because she knows how to act.

Triggered by Donald Trump Jr.

2019-12-10T06:00:00-05:00

When Donald Trump Jr.’s book, Triggered, leapt to the top of The New York Times’ best-seller list a few weeks ago, alert observers noticed something odd—odder even than the thought of Donald Trump Jr. writing a book. Next to the listed title was the image of a dagger. What it signified was unclear. Was it a sly commentary by the Times’ obsessively Trumpophobic editorial staff? I had read the book already and had a guess: A dagger was the first thing readers would reach for when they finished Triggered—something sharp and lethal that could be used to slit throats, our own or someone else’s, to obliterate the experience of having read the whole thing.

Weirdly, I was wrong. The Times explained that the dagger serves as a kind of asterisk. It warns readers that some portion of a book’s sales came in the form of bulk orders by institutions rather than through individual purchases by ordinary, humble book buyers such as ourselves. The implication is to question the book’s status as a boffo smash. In the case of Triggered, thousands of copies were bought by the Republican National Committee and then passed along as premiums to donors. A pro-Trump youth group called Turning Point USA and several Republican congressional candidates did the same, the Times reported in a news story.

The Times couldn’t offer any hard numbers, because, wrote the Times, “the Times does not disclose the methodology behind its best-seller lists,” even to itself.

It’s a trivial point, in any case. No one should doubt that Donald Trump Jr. has the celebrity mojo to move a hell of a lot of units. Indeed, his enormous popularity with a relatively large segment of the electorate is the best argument for looking into his book. As the first son of the most consequential president in a generation, heir in a few years (at most) to whatever political movement his father can leave behind, Don Jr. will likely be with us for quite a while. The book should be more interesting than it is.

[Read: The heir ]

Still, Triggered is a small window into the tastes of the Trump family’s most ardent admirers. Don Jr. is as alienated from mainstream liberal society as they are, despite having been born with advantages far beyond the dreams of the average Trump voter in the heartland. The advantages themselves, in his account, serve not as a barrier to understanding the lives of ordinary Americans but as the basis for commiseration, allowing him to relish the same self-pity and sense of grievance that are everywhere indispensable to today’s politics, right and left.

“Being a rich kid from New York,” he recalls of his prep-school days, “got me my ass kicked more than usual.” His very fame can be turned against him. “Even if I tweet something that’s relatively benign—say, a Merry Christmas message, the Twitter mob will find a way to attack me for it.” And of course there is the combustible mix of sex, skin color, wealth, and parentage that severely limits his range of permissible activity: “As the son of a rich white guy living in 2019,” he writes on page two, “I’m essentially not allowed to have an opinion anymore, let alone express that opinion in public.” The point is so nice, he makes it twice, returning to it on page 193: “As the son of a rich white man I know I’m not allowed to have an opinion, much less voice it these days.”

This is an exaggeration, of course—it comes to us in a book that is wall-to-wall opinions—but it’s an exaggeration of a special, Trumpian kind. Just as people often say “literally” when they’re speaking figuratively (“I literally inhaled that Baconator Double in, like, two seconds”), a Trumpian exaggeration is meant to get you to the truth by insinuation, without having to argue for it. The idea that Don Jr. is prevented from publicly expressing opinions is so obviously, transparently false that it has the perverse effect of making you wonder whether it’s an exaggeration of something that’s otherwise true. It isn’t, but fans of the Trumps surely take it this way. The untruth of the exaggeration, in other words, testifies to the underlying truth of what’s being exaggerated. The lie verifies.

It’s not news that our degraded politics has made truth elusive. Yet even seasoned Trump haters may be surprised at how elusive it has become for Don Jr. He recounts a well-worn story about the night of his birth.

“When my mother first approached him with the idea of naming me Don Jr.,” he writes, “my father is rumored to have said, ‘We can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?’ Again, no idea whether my father ever really said this.” I’ve provided the italics for Don Jr., because the source of this often-repeated anecdote is a book called Raising Trump, which was written by his mom.

The alienation Don Jr. and his troops feel from the liberal culture that surrounds them forces them to a poignant furtiveness. They want us to know that while they live in the world that liberalism has made, they are not of it. Or so they believe. In reality they dart in and out, as convenience allows.

The liberal press is thoroughly corrupt, Don Jr. tells us, irredeemable, essentially useless except as a contrary indicator of actual fact. Meanwhile, he is careful to support a large number of his anecdotes and assertions with footnotes—footnotes that cite The Washington Post, Time magazine, USA Today, and other enemies of the people. (We modestly note that The Atlantic alone earns five footnotes.) So, too, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which was a Democratic sham from first day to last. Yet Don Jr. is adamant that any suggestions that he was involved in Russian collusion have been definitely disproved. Don’t take his word for it, he says. Read the Mueller report.

Mueller, in Don Jr.’s estimation, is a “feeble old fool.” He makes this pronouncement several sentences before he writes: “I would actually like to think of this book as offering a reasoned antidote to all the hysterical bullshit that’s flying around right now. That used to be called discourse.”

Precisely when those good old days of discourse began, and when they came to an end, Don Jr. leaves unspecified, but a revealing, and by now legendary, moment in this regard came early on in his promotional tour for Triggered. He and his girlfriend, a former mid-list Fox News personality named Kimberly Guilfoyle, submitted to an interrogation with the hosts of ABC’s The View. Trump held his own and managed to rassle the contest to a draw.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Why the trolls booed at Don Jr.’s event]

We should stipulate that as an intellectual exercise, a guest turn on The View, confronting the combined exertions of Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Meghan McCain, is not exactly a dissertation defense at the Sorbonne. We are not talking about a graduate seminar with Stephen Hawking. What young Trump proved was that he could easily meet the hosts on their own level, bearing the same contempt for them that they held for him. When they brought up unflattering episodes from his father’s life, he brought up unflattering episodes from theirs. When they interrupted him, he interrupted their interruptions. When they got loud, he got louder.

It was, in other words, a nice miniature of the standard political performance art we have come to expect when Republican meets Democrat. Yet it was also something new, according to Don Jr. In his aggressiveness, he said, he was following the lead of his father. “He’s a counterpuncher,” Don Jr. told McCain, the show’s lone Republican panelist. “As a conservative, I would hope that you would appreciate that conservatives haven’t been known for fighting back for a very long time. They’ve ceded ground to the liberals and the liberal elites for decades by not actually fighting back.”

A counterpuncher, of course, is someone who got punched first. We are all counterpunchers now, or claim to be, merely reacting to the outrages that provoked our own—with no referee to ring the bell, and no end in sight.

It was a raucous hour. At one point, Goldberg pleaded with the audience to calm down, and in so doing, made the only statement that was unquestionably true: “The booing is fucking us up.”

Everyone Hates the Boomers, OK?

2019-11-29T10:44:44-05:00

Things come and go so quickly these days. Or is it just that some of us are slower on the uptake? Whatever: No sooner do we—does one—become aware of a meme or a trend or a catchphrase than it is unofficially declared done, over, kaput; the shark is judged to have been well and truly jumped.

“‘OK Boomer’?” said my editor, looking slightly alarmed at my choice of topic. “Is that still a thing?”

“Still?” I said.

“Only to Boomers,” a precocious colleague chimed in, unhelpfully.

Mayfly-like though the life cycle of a contemporary meme is, there are discrete phases to it. The meme emerges from some dim, untraceable nativity; to this day, for instance, no one can account for the origins of “OK Boomer.” The meme whistles around social media, imparting a glow of knowing cleverness to the first dozen users to post it to TikTok or Instagram or Twitter; for a quarter hour or more, these trailblazers feel themselves united in an unapproachable freemasonry of cool. Hours tick by, sometimes days. Soon, everyone wants in on the act, and the meme is everywhere. Samantha Bee uses it as a punch line. Incipient signs of exhaustion appear: Mo Rocca plans to build a six-minute segment around it for CBS Sunday Morning next weekend.

[Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything]

The death rattle of a meme is heard when some legit news outlet—The New York Times, NPR—takes notice and spies in the meme a cultural signifier, perhaps even a Larger Metaphor. Deep thinkers hover like vultures. The world surrounds the meme, engulfs it, suffocates it, drains it, ingests it. By the end of the week, Elizabeth Warren is using it as the subject line of an email fundraiser, next to a winking emoji. The shark, jumped, recedes ever deeper into the distance. Rocca’s segment airs. The meme is finished.

The particulars of the downward spiral change from meme to meme, of course. The end came for “OK Boomer” mid-month, when it was reported that Fox was trying to trademark the phrase for the title of a TV show.

TV—as in cable and broadcast? Fox? With this news, “OK Boomer” was immediately rendered as exciting and cutting-edge as the Macarena. You might as well freeze it in amber. Google Trends charted the ascent and the quick decline.

Having peaked nearly two weeks ago, the meaning of OK Boomer may have already been forgotten by its millions of users. Dictionary.com, the meme reliquary, is here to remind us: OK Boomer was a “slang phrase” used “to call out or dismiss out of touch or close-minded opinions associated with the Baby Boomer generation and older people more generally.” The essential document was a split-screen video, seen in various versions on YouTube and TikTok. On one side, a Baby Boomer, bearded, bespectacled, and baseball-capped (natch), lectured the camera on the moral failings of Millennials and members of Generation Z; on the other side, as the Boomer droned on in a fog of self-satisfaction, a non-Boomer (different versions exist) could be seen making a little placard: OK Boomer.

In an irony-soaked era, a word is often meant to be taken for its opposite, and so it was with OK Boomer. OK means “not okay”—OK here means (borrowing a meme with a longer shelf life) “STFU.” Many Boomers were thus quick to take offense, since taking offense is now a preapproved response to any set of circumstances at any time. One Boomer even objected to the plain word Boomer, calling it the “N-word of ageism.” Once again, Boomers are getting ahead of themselves. No one has yet begun referring to the “B-word” as a delicate alternative to the unsayable obscenity Boomer. My guess is that it will take a while.

Other Boomers, if you’ll pardon the expression, insisted that the national disgrace of “OK Boomer” would require the intervention of the heavy hand of the law, lest the injustice go uncorrected. A writer for Inc. magazine, a self-described Gen Xer, earnestly advised employers of whatever age to keep an ear open around the workplace. Casual use of the phrase, she wrote, could be a “serious problem.”

“If you have an employee, of any age, dropping the ‘Ok, Boomer’ line against any employee who is over the age of 40, you have to take it seriously,” wrote Inc.’s employment expert. “You can’t dismiss it as harmless banter.” Indeed, no banter should be deemed harmless any longer without prolonged and skeptical consideration. In the case of “OK Boomer,” its bantering might fall afoul of federal law banning discrimination against employees 40 and over. “A joke … can lead to patterns that create a hostile work environment, putting the company on the receiving end of a lawsuit.”

Much of what scholars might call “OK Boomer” literature—it’s a kind of pop-up literature, here today and gone tomorrow—dwelled on the ill will Gen Z feels toward Baby Boomers, but the most interesting thing about the meme is the way it undammed vast, transgenerational reservoirs of grievance and self-pity, running in every direction. Gen Z dislikes the Boomers for all the predictable reasons: for their condescension, as exemplified by the hectoring guy in the baseball cap, but also for hastening climate change, amassing national debt, raising college tuition, driving up real-estate prices, and electing Donald Trump. So high are the sins piled that, as the Times reported, entrepreneurial Gen Zers were forced to strike back with the most forceful response the Boomer generation has left them with: They printed T-shirts, and even hoodies, inscribed with Okay boomer have a terrible day.

[Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann: The coming generation war]

Harsh, yes, but not a unique sentiment in the round-robin of intergenerational unpleasantness. Millennials dislike Boomers for all the same reasons Gen Zers dislike them. Gen Xers, for their part, are growing increasingly unhappy because it’s dawning on them that they are about to be leapfrogged in the scheme of national succession. The Boomers stubbornly cling to power as the clock runs out: There’s as little chance a Gen Xer will become president of the United States as Prince Charles will succeed his mum without bumping her off. This seems to have increased the bad feeling the Xers have toward Millennials, who, as a generation, seem to have otherwise borne the brunt of many Boomer misfires (the Iraq War, the Great Recession). Meanwhile, the Millennials are quite happy to dismiss their youngsters as pampered and unworldly groundlings– snowflakes, to use the meme first popularized in the novel Fight Club, written, of course, by a Baby Boomer.

What “OK Boomer” made plain is that the only thing all these age cohorts agree on is that as bad as everybody else is, the Boomers are worse. There’s justice here. Boomers invented the generational antagonism that the “OK Boomer” meme thrived on and enlarged. For self-hating Boomers like me, this made the “OK Boomer” episode unusually clarifying and rewarding, and we should remain forever grateful to whatever whining, resentful non-Boomer thought it up. I’m sorry to see it go—especially because our elders never had a chance to use it.

These were the generations whose spawn we were, called the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. Their silence was one of the things that made them great. Still, a snappy comeback would have been handy 40 years ago, as we sanctimoniously hectored them with the many great truths we thought we had discovered, and with which we began our long cultural domination: “The Viet Cong are agrarian reformers!” “Condoms aren’t worth the trouble!” “Yoko Ono is an artist!”

How much vexation might have been avoided if they had just raised a hand and said, with a well-earned eye-roll: “OK Boomer.”