If the candidates trying to wrest their party’s presidential nomination from Donald Trump began the Republican debates over three months ago in a spirit of hope, they have plunged since then into a panicked state. A desperate one.
That’s the ugly, nasty place where they spent the fourth and possibly last of those debates on Wednesday night.
In the first minutes, Ron DeSantis accused Nikki Haley of cowering before activists from the left and sanctioning “child abuse” in the form of medical care for transgender minors. He sounded less like a national leader than like a playground bully.
Vivek Ramaswamy assailed Haley as “the only person more fascist than the Biden regime” and “far more corrupt” than he could ever have imagined — a line of attack that would later prompt him to hold up a piece of ruled paper on which he’d scrawled, in big block letters, “Nikki = corrupt.” It was the debate equivalent of graffiti on a school lavatory wall. He was an unhinged caricature of himself.
Haley, palpably seething beneath the surface, chalked up their attacks to sheer jealousy that her campaign had gathered momentum and so many prominent Republican donors were lining up behind her, while Chris Christie accurately described Ramaswamy as “the most obnoxious blowhard in America” and shouted at him, “Shut up!” It was heroic.
It was also totally, utterly pointless.
Ramaswamy’s going nowhere. Christie’s in the same sinking boat. If the polls are credible — and they’ve at least been consistent — not one of the four people onstage in Tuscaloosa, Ala., has made meaningful progress in peeling Republican voters away from Trump and closing the enormous gap between his front-runner status and their also-ran positions.
And their answer to that? Except for Christie, they devoted more time and energy to sniping at one another than to taking sustained and forceful aim at the actual agent of their political frustration, the real source of their electoral woe, the great orange obstacle between them and the White House. And that’s why they’re unlikely to get there.
These aspirants to the presidency have now spent four debates quarreling with one another, and they have now spent four debates pussyfooting around the absent leader of the pack and letting him off easy. What a timid game. What a perversely submissive strategy: Secure the No. 2 spot in Republican primary voters’ hearts and hope that Trump crosses some line he hasn’t crossed already or somehow — I don’t know — disappears. Their approach occupies the region of the Venn diagram where moral surrender and magical thinking overlap.
Christie called them out on it. He said that his three sparring partners were “acting as if the race is between the four of us.” “They’re afraid to offend,” he said, and he’s right. That fear could very well deliver the party’s nomination, for the third presidential election in a row, to a serial liar who has grown more and more honest about one thing: his authoritarian ambitions. His dictatorial fantasies.
Again providing the reality check, Christie noted as much. He sounded an alarm about Trump’s dark promises, denounced them and invited Haley, DeSantis and Ramaswamy to do the same. They declined to R.S.V.P.
Actually, they did worse. Ramaswamy played Trump fanboy. DeSantis checked off the unfinished business from Trump’s four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to suggest that the problem wasn’t Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia and desire to use the presidency as a tool of vengeance; it was his failure to follow through on his repressive, regressive musings. Haley just stood there mutely.
Oh, there was a point, at the very end, when she rallied to say what she should have said earlier, what she should have said repeatedly, what she should have said in a much bolder way. Cataloging all that was spinning out of control in the country and the world, she proclaimed: “We have to stop the chaos, but you can’t defeat Democrat chaos with Republican chaos. And that’s what Donald Trump gives us. My approach is different — no drama, no vendettas, no whining.”
But “chaos” is too gentle and kind a word for the danger that Trump poses. And where was this version of Haley for the nearly two hours before she finally summoned it? Where was it when one of the debate’s moderators asked her about Trump’s recent promise to bring back his Muslim travel ban and she spoke instead about the global menace of China?
DeSantis was even meeker, refusing — over and over — to answer a question about whether Trump was fit to be president. It was a kind of double entendre, referring specifically to Trump’s age but generally to so much more, and DeSantis looked petrified that he might somehow be duped or dragged into an actual response and incur the wrath of Trump or Trump’s followers. There was an ardent pleading in his eyes: Couldn’t he talk some more about banishing wokeness from Florida or return to characterizing Haley as a pawn of both her corporate donors and China? That was such comfy territory. And she was so much less scary than Trump.
Her recent rise in polls (at least vis-à-vis DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Christie) and influential Republicans’ increased interest in her predictably meant that she fielded a disproportionate number of attacks on Wednesday night, and the zest with which DeSantis and Ramaswamy ganged up on her was unseemly. She certainly seemed disgusted by it, alternately recoiling from it and creating the impression that she was floating above it. That translated into a somewhat subdued performance.
But I couldn’t shake the sense that DeSantis’s and Ramaswamy’s agitation wasn’t really about her improved standing, nor was it about the speed with which their own time was running out. It was about the seemingly hopeless situation for the whole lot of them. With less than six weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, there’s no sign that Trump is faltering. There’s no real reason to believe that he will falter — not if four indictments didn’t make that happen. Not if he has successfully stitched 91 felony counts into a cloak of honor.
And not if they’re unwilling to rip that cloak from him and confront the naked truth of his threat to American democracy. On Wednesday night, in place of such a reckoning, Ramaswamy challenged Haley and Christie to name three provinces of Ukraine. Right then! Right there! No atlas! No cheating!
The Republican Party is marching merrily toward autocracy, and he’s giving geography quizzes. Maybe there’s some kind of metaphor there. Maybe just a reason to weep.
For the Love of Sentences
George Santos, we hardly knew ye — because ye was buried under such a gargantuan pile of gaudy fabrications.
But we wrote about ye and how.
In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank wrote that “Santos showed just how far one could go with a lie, right down to the knee injuries he didn’t sustain while not playing volleyball on a scholarship he did not receive for the college he did not attend.” (Thanks to Susan Casey of Palm City, Fla., and Melissa Guensler of Fredericksburg, Texas, among many others, for nominating that.)
In The Times, Michelle Goldberg used her farewell to Santos to catalog the many miens of MAGA. “Different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz,” she wrote. “But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness.” (Joel Wizansky, New Haven, Conn., and Ian McLauchlan, East Lansing, Mich., among others)
To turn from Santos to Ron DeSantis and his televised skirmish with Gavin Newsom, David Frum in The Atlantic noted one of its many peculiarities: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.” (Kathryn Scotten, Portland, Ore., and Richard Salkin, Neptune Beach, Fla.) A side note: I wrote my own appraisal of that debate, published a day after last week’s newsletter, and you can read it here.
Also in The Atlantic, David Deming questioned the fixation on legacy admissions at elite colleges: “Reforms that shut down one form of preferential treatment in isolation will just increase focus on the others. It’s privilege whack-a-mole.” (Mary Rumsey, Salem, Ore.)
In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.” (Mike Bush, Los Osos, Calif.)
To return to The Times, Sopan Deb tucked a perfect treat into this look at a beloved television beast: “Cookie Monster, for those of you who skipped childhood, is a classic Muppet on ‘Sesame Street.’” (Thanks to Greg Retsinas of Portand, Ore. for nominating this.)
To return to The Washington Post, Philip Bump took expert aim at the language with which a top X executive tried to alchemize the platform’s reckless permissiveness into a virtue: “‘Information independence’ is a terrific phrase, in the same way that ‘alternative facts’ is. It’s a cloak of seriousness that nonsense can wear around the public square.” (Mark Murphy, Auburn, Wash.)
Also in The Post, Brian Levy introduced an unfamiliar sweet: “Imagine you’re an oatmeal cookie, gathered for the holidays with your family, including your distant cousin, the Rice Krispies Treat. In triumphantly struts another member of the clan, fresh from a year abroad, radiating worldliness, and speaking with a new accent. This is the Tahini Date Square.” (Barbara Keast, Groton, Mass.)
In The New Yorker, Richard Brody observed that what’s significant about the movies “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” isn’t just the money they made but the fact that they got made in the first place. “Both films’ subjects are as unusual as their styles: One is an existential exploration of a major figure in the worldwide expansion of American power, and the other is about a scientist,” he wrote. (Patrick Boyle, Arlington, Va.)
Finally, in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan examined the stewards of A.I. and voiced her alarm that we may be “putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge.” She added: “There’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core.” (Liana Neyer, Carlsbad, 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 include your name and place of residence.
Bonus Regan Picture!
Is this Regan keeping watch over the front door at the bottom of the stairs, lest some terrifying package deliverer or mail carrier storm our bunker? No. This is Regan blocking my migratory route from shower to garage, where I will climb into my car and drive away, possibly without her. She wants me to feel the weight of that abandonment. She wants me to feel the guilt. So, I imagine, she poses as prettily as she can, white forelegs outstretched. And I do feel guilty. But somebody has to keep the lights on. Somebody has to pay for all of those dog treats.
On a Personal Note
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the “test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,” and those words have been in the foreground of my thoughts almost constantly since the slaughter in Israel on Oct. 7.
Maybe it’s more accurate to say that corollaries of those words have, because I think that the ability to acknowledge a complicated reality — and, say, to denounce fully and loudly what Hamas terrorists did without feeling that you’ve somehow shortchanged Palestinians’ suffering or diminished their cause — is the test not so much of a first-rate intelligence as of a first-rate morality.
Over the past few days, The Times and other publications have published articles noting how reluctant many progressive politicians and many humanitarian groups, such as UN Women, have been to acknowledge and express outrage about the unspeakable sexual violence against women in Israel during those blood-soaked hours. My colleague Bret Stephens had an especially powerful column on that topic. One of the main reasons for that reticence and outright silence? Broken pelvises and mutilated genitalia are seen as inconvenient talking points if your script and your focus is the oppression of Palestinians by Israelis.
But a first-rate morality can recognize, care about and crusade against that oppression and still call a rape a rape. Decency can carve out mention of — and disgust with — unconscionable brutality amid a broader discussion about the larger conflict. It can mourn what needs mourning and condemn what demands condemnation without betraying other concerns. It can simultaneously pressure Israel to show greater mercy in Gaza and call for an end to Hamas’s murderous hold on Gazans. It has awareness enough to see bad actors everywhere and not just some hierarchy of power. It has empathy enough to flow in multiple directions.
From almost Oct. 8 onward, I’ve listened to people quibble with x report of the atrocities on Oct. 7, with y description, with z figure, and what I’ve heard isn’t any strict and simple devotion to provable fact. It’s a desire to tidy up the carnage in the service of a neat and clean taxonomy of villains and victims. And there’s neither first-rate intelligence nor first-rate morality in that.
Share
Print
