The Republican politicians who know full well that the presidential election wasn’t stolen and recognize the danger of Donald Trump’s insistence otherwise tell themselves that they’re performing a service when they bite their tongues.
Their thinking goes something like this: If they speak the truth and curse the king, they’ll just lose to — and be replaced by — other, lesser Republicans who genuinely believe the big lie, who truly revere Trump and who’d tug the country into a pit of florid craziness from which there might be no extraction. They’re saving us.
It’s a comprehensible calculation, an artful rationalization. It’s also a moral surrender whose logic fades as it grinds on and grinds them down.
Did you watch or read about Mitch McConnell’s onstage interview with the Axios reporter Jonathan Swan last week? What a horror show that was. I don’t mean the atmospherics: McConnell never squirmed, never shouted, never broke a sweat. Neither did Swan, to his considerable credit.
I mean the substance of it. The message. Swan noted, pointedly, that after Trump’s second impeachment, for his role in the Jan. 6 riots, McConnell did speak the truth. Did curse the king. In uncharacteristically stirring remarks on the Senate floor, McConnell upbraided Trump for “a disgraceful dereliction of duty” and held him “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
And then, weeks later, McConnell backpedaled and made clear that he would back Trump if he’s the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2024. Swan pointedly noted that, too.
And McConnell laughed. “I think I have an obligation to support the nominee of my party, and I will,” he explained. He put no qualifications on that. No limits. By that logic, if the party nominates a horse, McConnell won’t say nay. He’ll just neigh.
It would be a sound as dignified as any he’s making now.
McConnell’s title is Senate minority leader. That last word is a joke. Like Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, he’s not leading. He’s following — and he’s being yanked in unconscionable directions.
It’s one thing to tailor your position on taxes or tweak your statements about trade in accordance with your voters’ shifting sentiments. That’s part and parcel of democracy. It’s another to coddle and abet a would-be autocrat and indulge his supporters’ cries that the current president is illegitimate. That guts democracy.
And it’s the point at which a real patriot must ask: Am I making a forgivable compromise in order do some good down the line? Or am I lost?
I thought about that as I read the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green’s recent profile of David McCormick, who’s running against Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania for the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat. I’ve spent time with McCormick, as I have with Oz, and always found him to be sensible, sensitive, intelligent. He wasn’t Trump-y in the least, and he didn’t exhibit any desire to be.
But then, I guess, he examined the political landscape more closely — and began making his own calculations.
As Green wrote, the Pennsylvania primary has put the lie to the idea, initially promoted by McConnell and other prominent Republicans, that Trump’s influence over their party was waning and that they were moving on. Instead, Green explained, “Everyone’s clamoring for the former president’s seal of approval.”
Why? Green got his hands on a private poll from a Republican consultant that showed that 82 percent of the state’s Republican primary voters have a favorable view of Trump and 70 percent think that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
McCormick’s campaign employs former Trump aides — including Stephen Miller. McCormick sprinkles touches of Trump into his pitch. He jousted with Oz for Trump’s favor, and when Green, in an interview, pressed him on whether he subscribed to the belief that the election was stolen, he bobbed, weaved, hemmed, hawed and talked about the importance of recognizing and addressing voters’ lack of faith in the outcome.
No. Wrong. When voters engage in a kind of magical thinking that violates the very compact on which civic life and democracy depend, you confront that. You illuminate them. You don’t murmur some mealy-mouthed version of “I see your point” or “I respect your perspective.”
That, apparently, is McConnell’s job.
McCormick never did answer Green. And then he didn’t get Trump’s endorsement anyway. Oz claimed that bastard prize, in part because he’s a fellow celebrity and Melania Trump likes him, according to some reports. Does that last sentence leave you as depressed about politics in our great nation as it does me?
I’m looking for hope and for heroes, and I’m coming up painfully short.
‘Detached from reality’
Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney: Are they — yet again — the missing Republican heroes?
They’re the only three Republican senators who rose above the scorched-earth partisanship on Capitol Hill and voted to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. True, they haven’t consistently behaved with such independence of thought; there are past instances aplenty when their votes seemed to be motivated less by principle than by party fealty.
But the same can be said of Democratic colleagues of theirs in the Senate, and I believe, especially in these fractious and furious times, in breathing sighs of relief when we can and giving credit where it’s due. I also want to draw attention to what Collins and Murkowski said. Their words are as important as their votes.
“No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, anyone who has watched several of the last Supreme Court confirmation hearings would reach the conclusion that the process is broken,” Collins said in an official statement explaining her support of Jackson. She reminded Americans that Justice Antonin Scalia, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, was confirmed by a vote of 98 to 0. The vote for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993, was 96 to 3.
The vote for Judge Jackson was 53 to 47.
Murkowski said that her decision to be among those 53 rested in part on her “rejection of the corrosive politicization of the review process for Supreme Court nominees, which, on both sides of the aisle, is growing worse and more detached from reality by the year.”
“Detached from reality” — that’s an apt description of many of the Pennsylvanians who responded to the poll I mentioned earlier. But then it’s an equally apt description of much else on the political scene.
For the Love of Sentences
Tom Cotton isn’t a prose gift on a par with Ted Cruz, but he’s not far behind. Dana Milbank had this to say, in The Washington Post, about one of Cotton’s critics calling him a “little maggot-infested man” after he referred to Judge Jackson as a Nazi sympathizer: “Fake news! Cotton might go low, but, at 6-foot-5, he is not little. Also, maggots typically feed on dead things, and Cotton, though stiff, is not currently deceased. The man likes to carry on, but he is not carrion.” (Thanks to Lois DiTommaso of Rutherford, N.J., for nominating this.)
Sticking with The Post, here’s the book critic Ron Charles, mingling a famous line from Emily Dickinson’s poetry with a reference to the pandemic: “‘There is no frigate like a book,’ which is a good thing because I’ve been stuck at home for two frigate years.” (Lu-Ann Farrar, Lexington, Ky.)
And here’s Matt Bai on Sarah Palin’s attempt at a political comeback in Alaska: “Her poll numbers there have been close to abysmal ever since she traded in the governorship for the bright lights of basic cable.” (Joanne Parrilli, Reno, Nev.)
In The Atlantic, David Sims weighed in on the “frenetic, maximalist style” of the movie director Michael Bay, who has “never met a plot that he couldn’t overstuff, and ‘Ambulance’ is a flaming turducken of an action epic.” (Simeon Stolzberg, North Adams, Mass., and Beverly Quist, Utica, N.Y.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Beaton examined the mystery of why a beloved ice cream sandwich was no longer for sale at the recent Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Ga.: “At a club so tight-lipped it makes mimes look loquacious, there hasn’t been a clear explanation for its disappearance.” (John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)
In The Times, John McWhorter took eloquent issue with the vagueness of “African,” given the size and diversity of the continent to which it refers: “We wind up with the idea of a generic Africanness that is about as peculiar as the idea of people donning berets, sitting in kilts, quaffing steins of lager and eating Swedish meatballs while reading ‘Anna Karenina’ and saying they’re celebrating their European heritage.” (Linda Watt, Weaverville, N.C., and Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich., among others)
And Molly Young packed her review of the new novel “Young Mungo,” by Douglas Stuart, with paragraphs and sentences worthy of his. “A critic could generate a whole book review simply by reproducing her marginalia,” she began. “It would be boring to read but accurate, like an EKG printout.” She later added: “If a perfume creator wished to bottle the olfactory landscape of post-Thatcher-era Glasgow, all the necessary ingredients could be found in Stuart’s descriptions of sausage grease, fruity fortified wine, pigeon droppings and store-bought hair bleach.” And in conclusion, she wrote that there is “crazy greatness in ‘Young Mungo,’ along with corny lapses and moments with the expository flatness of a TV voice-over. Still, faulting a novel of this register for intemperance feels like faulting an opera for being ‘too loud.’ The volume is part of the point. Sometimes you wince. Often you exult.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.
On a Personal Note
I had never set foot in the Chapel Hill, N.C., home I now own when I made my successful bid to buy it in the middle of May last year. I had never set foot in it when — via email and digital documents — I finalized that purchase in early June.
It was all rush, all risk, because real estate transactions in this country’s hottest housing markets were a cutthroat frenzy of smartphone tours, waived contingencies and leaps of brick-and-mortar faith. (By many signs, they still are.) I had bid on and lost four houses before finally securing mine. So what if the ornamental hood above the kitchen stove looked, according to the video that my broker took, like the ripped-off and repurposed lid of the world’s largest and most gratuitously sparkly tagine? Or if the grass-challenged, flinty backyard called to mind the flaky scalp of a man balding in the most erratic way? I needed a roof over my head, I needed closure, and I’d see what some topsoil and seed could do.
I was reminded of my panic by a recent letter to the editor of The Boston Globe that my friend Andrew Ginsburg wrote. It’s a very funny riff on the kinds of paeans with which prospective home buyers, trying to edge out the competition, woo sellers. It reimagines one of those missives as a candid confession.
“My wife and I want to thank you for allowing us to bid 20 percent over your asking price for a house that we believe is overvalued by at least 30 percent,” he wrote, later adding, “We dream of replacing the hideous light fixture in the living room, and at 6 feet 3 inches, I look forward to ducking under the abnormally low ceiling every time I go upstairs.”
I have replaced many fixtures. I have painted, and went with a daringly dark blue in my bedroom and an audaciously bright orange in the dining room. Those choices in part reflected my misgivings when I did walk through my house for the first time and wondered: What have I done? I buried my doubts under bold colors.
And somewhere along the way, those doubts disappeared. I came to love my house. That speaks to its genuine lovability: For each of its flaws, there’s a virtue, like a sun room with beautiful trees just beyond its many windows.
But my appreciation also reflects a purposeful decision, a willful orientation. With a house, a job, a friend, a life, you can dwell on what isn’t to your liking or you can savor the good parts, the blessings, starting with the lucky fact that you have any or all of those things.
You can focus on gratitude — to a point. That tagine lid, I assure you, is on borrowed time.
