Bret Stephens: Frank, is it time for someone to make a TV show called “Real Housewives of the Trump Cabinet”?
Frank Bruni: The ingredients are all there! Gilded locations. Flamboyant pettiness. Booze. An exorbitant hair and makeup budget. But I do have a question: Are we spotlighting actual spouses — Kristi Noem’s, Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s, Melania — or are Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel and JD Vance the overexcitable divas in this project? Because this could go either way.
Bret: It could. But let’s not mention Patel — the extremely handsome and always-on-the-job F.B.I. director — because he might sue us. Or worse.
Frank: He might. And for many hundreds of millions. In the Trump administration, you’re not really denying an allegation unless you threaten litigation and attach some cartoonish financial figure to it.
Bret: As for Chavez-DeRemer, the now-former labor secretary, I have to admit I knew next to nothing about her until I read about her resignation on Monday — she was previously a one-term member of Congress and mayor of Happy Valley, Ore., which is like the Wasilla of the lower 48.
Frank: She does give off Sarah Palin vibes. And seems similarly destined for post-government glory.
Bret: Here are a few excerpts from the report in The Times: “Dozens” of Labor Department employees “described a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary and hostile aides.” An inspector general investigation was looking into allegations that she “was having an affair with a subordinate and that she and her top aides regularly concocted official trips to destinations where Ms. Chavez-DeRemer could socialize and see family.” Text messages reviewed by The Times “suggested that the secretary was drinking during the workday.” Her husband, Shawn DeRemer, was “barred from the department’s headquarters, after female staff members accused him of making unwanted sexual advances, including filing a police report.”
With a résumé like this, Frank, she could be our next secretary of homeland security. Or war!
Frank: No joke, Bret: I have come to realize that normal language is inadequate and precedents are irrelevant when it comes to appraising President Trump’s cabinet and other senior administration officials. Trump didn’t just hire incompetent people. He didn’t just hire lickspittles. He visited some perverse preserve of the morally degenerate — some superstore of grifters and goons — and said, “I’ll take the worst of the worst. A baker’s dozen, please!” And on this score, the self-proclaimed master dealer got exactly the goods he wanted.
Bret: “Perverse preserve” — gonna remember that one. Also recall, Trump wanted Matt Gaetz — of whom a House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” that he had done drugs and paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl while he was a 35-year-old congressman — as his attorney general. Instead we got Pam Bondi who [checks notes] Trump also recently fired.
Frank: Oh, I remember Gaetz. I can still smell the Axe body spray. Your mention of Bondi proves my point: When she’s the upgrade, you’re looking at the motliest and mangiest of crews.
As for her firing, perhaps the cultural reference point we should be using right now isn’t “Real Housewives” but Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” Noem, Bondi, DeRemer — the body count is rising fast.
Bret: Or the nursery rhyme “Five Little Monkeys.”
Frank: I get the feeling that after spending the first year of his second term trying to prove that his White House wouldn’t have the kind of revolving door it did last time around, Trump will be regressing to that velocity of turnover. Watch out, Kash. Keep your head down, Pete. Or maybe I’m gripped not by prescience but by hope. A boy can dream.
Bret: An Egyptian friend of mine, in the years when Hosni Mubarak was dictator, once explained to me that the key to running a long-term autocracy is always to take care that your immediate subordinates are even dumber and more corrupt than you are. That way, they’re too stupid to obstruct or overthrow you, and too compromised to be anything but slavishly loyal.
At the time he told me this, which was in 2009 or so, I didn’t expect it would describe American government to a T in just a few years’ time.
Frank: We could spend the rest of this conversation, the rest of this day, the rest of this year listing current realities of American, um, leadership that we didn’t expect. Of American architecture, too. I’d love your thoughts, Bret, on Trump’s Triumphal Arch, the projections for which seem to grow larger and tackier by the nanosecond. I’ll start by saying something positive: It’s emerging as a perfect companion piece for the Trump ballroom.
Bret: It seems to be modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned in 1806 after his victory at Austerlitz. It was only completed long after his defeat at Waterloo, which is history Trump should be more mindful of — if only he knew history.
Frank: Remind me who the architect is? And whether that person is the progeny of Ayn Rand and Liberace?
Bret: Someone named Nicolas Leo Charbonneau. But it says something that Catesby Leigh, the person who first proposed the arch as a modest 60 foot monument to commemorate the 250th — has now repudiated the currently planned height of 250 feet as “way too big for that site.” Move over, Liberace, and say hello to Ozymandias.
But let’s cross the bridge from D.C. to Virginia: Your thoughts on the redistricting vote there?
Frank: It made me very happy and it made me very sad. Look, Democrats had no choice. They had to do this. They really did. They couldn’t stand on principle while Republicans gerrymandered Texas, North Carolina and other states. They couldn’t let the Republican Party win the House that way, especially given how Republicans — under Trump — are governing. That’s national suicide.
But these gerrymanders are anti-democratic and a big, big part of why so many American voters feel so disenfranchised and cynical. And I’m not sure how we get past this, given the tit-for-tat nature of partisan warfare for decades now.
Bret: I agree. It’s part of the race to the bottom that is the Trump era writ large. The all-but-inevitable result is that more and more states are going to do this, effectively disenfranchising the many millions of Americans who belong to the partisan minority in their respective states. And, in doing so, the parties are themselves going to lean even further to the left or the right, since there is even less of an incentive for any politician to appeal to the center.
The only way to overcome this is by overturning Rucho v. Common Cause, the 2019 Supreme Court decision that said that courts could not intervene to prevent the creation of even the most extreme gerrymandered districts. A bad decision that conservatives will come to regret.
Frank: On the subject of leftward leaning, I’m curious for your take on what’s happening in the Democratic Senate primaries in Maine and Michigan. I’m still trying to process my own thoughts. The latest polling suggests that Graham Platner is the heavy favorite to beat Gov. Janet Mills in Maine and be the Democrat to challenge the Republican incumbent, Senator Susan Collins, in November. And Abdul El-Sayed seems to be on equal footing, at the least, with Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow in Michigan, where Democrats are trying to hold on to the seat that Senator Gary Peters is vacating. Platner and El-Sayed are the darlings of many progressives. Are Democrats playing with fire here?
Bret: Well, if I were Mike Rogers, the likely Republican nominee for the Senate seat in Michigan, I’d be hoping that Democrats nominate El-Sayed. For one thing, if he’s the nominee, many of Michigan’s Jewish voters — about 100,000 people or so — are either going to stay home or vote for Rogers, given that El-Sayed has campaigned with raging antisemites like the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
Maine is trickier, because the state has an independent streak. And Platner, for all of the baggage — outrageous social media posts, a Nazi-themed tattoo, the fact that he parades as a working-class hero when he’s a product of Hotchkiss — is a gifted campaigner. But Susan Collins didn’t win five consecutive Senate terms (including in 2020) by being politically inept. She almost always runs ahead of her polling.
Frank: I’m very worried that El-Sayed and Platner are general-election risks, both of them more easily caricatured by Republicans than the other Democratic candidates would be. But there are some important lessons here. El-Sayed’s traction reflects the deep and understandable concerns that many voters have about Israel’s conduct over recent years and the degree to which the United States has abetted it. And Platner’s popularity speaks in part to voters’ exhaustion with the gerontocracy in the Democratic Party. Mills is 78 years old. Platner is 41.
Bret: If Democrats want to quarrel with Israel’s prosecution of the war, by all means they should do so. I’ll quarrel back. If they want to get in bed with Piker, who said “America deserved 9/11,” and that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” then I don’t see a stitch of difference between liberals who are OK with him and conservatives who are OK with Tucker Carlson.
Frank: These days, even Tucker Carlson isn’t OK with Tucker Carlson. He’s begging forgiveness for having helped to elevate Trump. Sure, Tucker! No worries! Because that didn’t do any meaningful damage ….
Bret: The larger mistake Democrats would make by nominating candidates like El-Sayed or Platner is that they think voters who are turned off by Trumpism want a left-wing mirror image of Trump’s Republicans. That’s a political mistake. What voters want is sanity from Democrats, not another version of insanity.
Frank: Piker has said disgusting, reprehensible things, and I don’t think El-Sayed should be proudly campaigning with him. By all means, judge El-Sayed by that decision. But Democrats in general have hardly gotten into bed with Piker, and if some of them find his words compelling on certain fronts, that does not mean they’re validating and lionizing him across the board.
Bret: At last, we disagree. Saying you disagree with Piker on certain issues isn’t a valid excuse when the core of his message is so bigoted and repellent. It reminds me a bit of the Heritage Foundation president, the goateed dimwit whose name now escapes me, who defended Carlson after that interview with Nick Fuentes. Sorry, but in political life, some things really should be deal breakers.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
