Donald Trump contains multitudes.
Are you a Black voter enraged by criminal justice inequalities? He feels your pain. He knows your pain. In a Manhattan courtroom recently, he confronted what you confront: same stacked deck, same disrespect. Or at least that’s a perspective that Trump’s allies have promoted since a jury said “guilty” 34 times.
Do East Coast elites look down their upturned noses at you, and does the big bad federal government try to quash any actions you take or words you utter in defiance of it? Him, too! When federal agents came for those classified documents scattered like pocket change around Mar-a-Lago, they were really coming for you. They used Trump to teach you a lesson and flexed their contempt for you through their indictment of him. He has made that claim repeatedly.
In a fund-raising email sent by his campaign last week, Trump said, “If we fail to have a MASSIVE outpouring of patriotic support — right here, right now — they’ll TAKE ME OUT and move on to their real target: YOU!!”
And all the Jesus Christ allusions of late by Trump and his disciples? No ambiguity there. No subtlety. He is dying — well, going through a tough time with titanic legal bills — for your sins. But you can always make things better by buying a $59.99 Trump-branded Bible.
“The transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement,” wrote Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, in a Substack post this month. “Trump the Totem” was the headline.
While Jones rightly registered an intensification of that transformation since Trump’s felony convictions on May 30, the audacious, laughable and shockingly successful project of turning Trump — a playboy plutocrat and singular specimen — into Everyman has been central and crucial to his political ascent from the start.
It’s a fitful endeavor repeatedly undermined by his taste for high floors and high thread counts: Just this week, as Michael Gold reported in The Times, Trump had to change his plans for where he would stay during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next month when reporters made inquiries and learned that he initially decided on the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, some 90 miles away. He has now scrapped that itinerary in favor of the city and state that are actual hosts to his coronation. I hope he can find the requisite coddling and swaddling there.
Many presidents cast themselves as symbols to amplify their message and broaden their outreach. President Barack Obama described the union of his Kenya-born father and Kansas-born mother as a quintessentially American story. President Bill Clinton was introduced as “the man from Hope” not principally for geographic reasons — that’s the Arkansas city in which he was born — but for emotional ones. It made him a mascot for American optimism and upward mobility.
But Trump had a special need to turn himself into a symbol. He had to collapse the distance between his natural habitat of gilded aeries and lush fairways and the shabbier patches of earth that most other mortals tread. He had to establish a kinship, assert a commonality. His deliberately and gratuitously off-color remarks — and his subsequent outcries when critics predictably took him to task for those — played to many Americans’ sense that they could no longer speak their minds or even ask sloppily worded questions without fear of punishment.
Trump purposely took on people they’d dreamed of taking on and intentionally decried social changes that unsettled or displeased them. He was — and is — more than their mouthpiece. He’s their repressed id.
Symbolic resonance helps him in another critical way. It allows voters to redirect their focus from the amoral and unhinged actuality of him toward a larger meaning — as if they were stepping back from a pointillist painting so that they see not all the messy-looking individual brushstrokes but, instead, coherent images, grand patterns. Trump the philanderer, Trump the con man and Trump the felon become Trump the defiant, Trump the disrupter, Trump the martyr. The sordid tale told in that Manhattan courtroom gets an epic revision, with a new role for Trump. He’s not Weakloins. He’s Braveheart.
And he’s ever the victim. Corrupt and condescending forces are arrayed against him in the manner that many of his supporters believe such forces are arrayed against them.
“I am your retribution,” he said last year, toward the beginning of his current campaign, and that line will live long not only because it’s a prompt for fury — a summons to vengeance — but also because it’s his principal strategy in four blunt words: I am your vessel. I am your proxy. In me you should see a reflection of yourself.
That’s some trick mirror.
For the Love of Sentences
In USA Today, Mike Freeman countered some Republicans’ politicization of Caitlin Clark’s omission from the American women’s basketball team at the Paris Olympics: “They don’t know basketball. They think a guard is someone you overrun at the Capitol.” (Thanks to Olivia Rasmussen of Baltimore for nominating this.)
In New York magazine, Olivia Nuzzi and Andrew Rice recalled the back-and-forth between Trump and Michael Cohen during Trump’s recent trial: “On social media, Trump called his former henchman a ‘jailbird’ and a ‘sleaze bag.’ In rebuttal, Cohen called Trump ‘Von ShitzInPantz’ and a ‘Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.’ ‘Inherit the Wind’ it was not.” (Russell Lacy, Durham, N.C.)
In a column in The Washington Post on Justice Samuel Alito, Theodore R. Johnson wrote: “There’s nothing wrong with a praying judge. But the long arm of the law is not the hand of God.” (Michael Comlish, Los Angeles)
In a Substack post, Joe Posnanski described Willie Mays’s relationship with his own acclaim and fame: “Even Mays himself couldn’t quite understand it. ‘All I did was play baseball,’ he would say when approached by another fan with tears in his eyes. On one level, this was true. All he did was play baseball. All Robert Frost did was write poetry. All Grace Kelly did was play in movies. All Albert Einstein did was think about the universe.” (Brian MacConnell, Cincinnati)
In The Times, Joseph Bernstein profiled a man whose higher education went on and on: “There’s something almost anachronistically earnest, even romantic, about the reason he gives for spending the past 30-odd years pursuing college degrees. ‘I love learning,’ he told me over lunch last year, without even a touch of irony. I had been pestering him for the better part of two days, from every angle I could imagine, to offer some deeper explanation for his life as a perpetual student. Every time I tried, and failed, I felt irredeemably 21st-century, like an extra in a historical production who has forgotten to remove his Apple Watch.” (Stephanie Zarpas, Annapolis, Md., and Joshua Bress, Cupertino, Calif., among others)
Also in The Times, the musician and writer Dessa remembered an especially unsettling visit to the doctor: “A physician assistant pushed a thin tube mounted with a camera up my nostril then snaked it down my throat, scanning for any visible causes of my symptoms. When it was pulled out a minute later, I shuddered — improbably, the sensation was like having a piece of myself removed, a shrimp being deveined.” (Lisa Clemmons Stott, Springfield, Ill.)
And Pete Wells took righteous issue with that infernal annual inventory of what are supposedly the premier dining establishments on the planet: “They are not restaurants, or not just restaurants. They are endurance tests, theatrical spectacles, monuments to ego and — the two most frightening words in dining — ‘immersive experiences.’ Whether the World’s 50 Best seeks out these spectacular spectaculars or has simply been hijacked by them is impossible to tell. The list’s website is a model that should be studied by anyone who wants to arrange words that sound important and don’t mean anything.” (Dick Hughes, Rowley, Mass., and Peter J. Comerford, Providence, R.I.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
I’m in the kitchen, I’m 99 percent certain that Regan is in the adjacent family room, and last time I checked, she was on her doggy bed there. I hear the signature rustle of her rise from it and then, maybe four seconds later, something else. Something I can’t identify. Sounds like a large object being dragged or shoved. Followed by silence.
Huh. I go to look. No sign of Regan. Weird, because she made no audible exit from the family room. I shift my gaze this way and that, and I catch a glimpse of black fur poking out from the hollow base of the coffee table, which she has cunningly repurposed as a cave.
She’s like a child in a makeshift fort. It’s genius. So why hasn’t she claimed and used this space before? Maybe she has, and I wasn’t around or wasn’t paying attention.
Or maybe you can indeed teach an old dog new digs.
Words are like some romantic partners. Along comes a new one, and we’re tickled, we’re smitten, we can’t believe how beautifully it fits into our lives, we can’t get enough of it. Until we’ve had too much. Its jolt and joy came from its unexpectedness, eroded by overexposure.
“Curate,” we’ll always treasure the memories, but we’d like our keys back, and we promise to forward your mail.
I can’t pinpoint when “curate” made the leap from a verb used predominantly for art exhibits to one applied in other contexts, but when that first happened, I thought: How clever. How fresh. “Curate” instead of “choose,” “curate” rather than “assemble” or “showcase” or “arrange” or “cull.” Chefs curated flavors. Tour planners curated experiences. It had the scent of sophistication.
But the curators multiplied. The curation metastasized. It took on the perfume of pretension and then the stench of rank mimicry.
“I do not require a salad especially curated for lovers of legumes,” Lisa C. Stewart of Boise, Idaho, wrote to me recently, urging a purging of the word. “Walmart sent me a new shopping list, noting that it had been curated from my past purchases.”
“My fave classical radio station hosts ‘curate’ their playlists,” chimed in Pat Summers of Lawrenceville, N.J. She noted that she recently read an article in another newspaper that ended with links to three additional articles “hand curated” for her. “Hoping as you curate your column ingredients,” she wrote to me, “you’ll consider taking on this word!”
Stephen Miller of Reston, Va., echoed her plea, as have dozens of other newsletter readers, and he directed me to an essay that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal about the word’s overuse. “Do you curate?” his article began. “An increasing number of Americans are busy doing just that. In the past month I’ve read about people who curate wine, beer, tea and coffee beans. Facebook, a professor of psychology says, is ‘curating news and information that will keep you watching.’”
Miller did not hold back the tide. His article appeared in December 2017. In 2018, according to a Google search I did for “curate” in news sources, it appeared about 36,900 times. In 2023, according to an analogous search, it appeared 140,000 times.
That’s enough, and this is my pledge: I shall never refer to “For the Love of Sentences” as a curation of special prose. Just as a romp (that’s not overused, is it?) for readers who appreciate artfully chosen words.
“Retire These Words!,” which used to be called “Words Worth Sidelining,” is an occasional feature that has been appearing every few months for about two years. Many of you came to it after it started; I know because you’ve submitted nominations for words or phrases already covered. So here are links to past newsletters with this feature. I have written about (or perhaps railed against) “it is what it is,” “amazing,” “at the end of the day,” “long story short,” “unpack,” nonsensical dog metaphors, expressions overused by political journalists, more expressions overused by political journalists, “trump” as a verb, “iconic,” “existential,” “handcrafted” and qualifiers such as “in all honesty.” More to come.
In Memoriam
James Kent, a chef whose career hit dazzling new peaks over the past five years, had a heart attack and died suddenly on Saturday, at the age of 45. I got to know him a bit, many years after I stopped reviewing restaurants, and I repeatedly found myself on the receiving end of his kindness and generosity. Please read his obituary, by Alex Traub, in The Times. And please know that in an industry with plenty of pretenders and prima donnas, he was neither. He brought heaping measures of talent and grace to everything he did.