We’ve spent the past few days deconstructing what happened at the Iowa caucuses. I’m still stuck on what happened before:
We saw just how faithfully the Republican Party now worships at the church of nasty. Just how fully it genuflects before the great god of nastiness, Donald Trump.
I don’t mean by supporting and voting for him, though there’s that. I mean by idolizing and emulating him. By accepting as catechism his perverse moral logic. By taking one of his favorite words as an optimal mode of conduct and a set of marching orders. He called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” back in the day. Just this week, he called the jurist presiding over one of his civil trials “a nasty judge” and “a nasty man.” And you know how it is with Trump, whose behavior is textbook projection: When he’s attaching an epithet to you, he’s making an admission about himself.
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis got the “nasty” memo. In Iowa, they were campaigning, at least theoretically, as alternatives to Trump, so you would have expected them to be less, well, nasty. But in their one-on-one debate last week, with the clock ticking and their odds of winning the Republican presidential nomination growing tinier and tinier, what they did above all was show just how mean to each other — just how gratuitously, performatively nasty and Trumplike — they could be.
DeSantis used his first comments in the first minutes of that debate to pivot from himself to Haley and attack her as a liar. Across the next two ugly hours, she called him a liar on auto-repeat. It was incessant. It was emblematic. Both DeSantis and Haley wagered that in their party today, remade in Trump’s image, that behavior wouldn’t seem cheap and desperate. It would seem gutsy. It was a credential of leadership.
Two memorable articles published just before the caucuses demonstrated how thoroughly that thinking has animated DeSantis’s approach to politics in general and his presidential bid in particular. In The Times, Nicholas Nehamas detailed all the conventionally inspirational bits of DeSantis’s life story — and how seldom, if ever, DeSantis makes mention of them.
“If there were ever a time for Mr. DeSantis to tell more of his bootstrap biography it would be now, as his hopes of a strong finish in the Iowa caucuses, and perhaps his entire presidential campaign, seem to be ebbing away,” Nehamas wrote. That DeSantis didn’t do so says something about his coldness, but it also says something about his assessment of his party and its voters. He put his chips on meanness and mercilessness, listing all the enemies he’d slain as governor of Florida, all the enemies he’d slay if promoted to the White House.
That came across in the other article, an account by Sarah Larson in The New Yorker of his final-hours campaigning in Iowa. At one stop, Larson wrote, “he leaned hard on the Mafia-esque assertion that in Florida he had ‘kneecapped’ E.S.G. — investing that takes into account environmental, social and corporate-governance issues.” At another, he railed against electric vehicles and vowed to secure a line-item veto so he could do away with “promoting transgenderism in Bangladesh” before “decrying Brooklyn’s sheltering homeless migrants in a school,” Larson added. Get your ooey-gooey inspiration elsewhere. Get your down-and-dirty spite right here.
Or from Vivek Ramaswamy. Before he ceased qualifying for Republican debates, his own performances at those events charted an ascent from the base camp to the peak of nastiness: He seemed to mock Chris Christie’s weight, telling him to “walk yourself off that stage, enjoy a nice meal and get the hell out of this race,” and held up a pad of paper on which he’d written “Nikki = Corrupt.” That was a bid for media attention, yes, but it was also a window into an inverted ethical universe, one where nastiness is toughness, the measure of how far you’ll go and how much you’ll dare. One where bullying is boldness. One where contempt is strength.
One where Trump reigns supreme. Despite a huge lead over his rivals in Iowa polls, he flexed his nastiness in the homestretch, deciding to question Haley’s U.S citizenship and eligibility for the presidency. Once a birther, ever a birther.
The news the morning after Trump won the caucuses in a landslide was that he hadn’t trashed her and DeSantis anew in his celebratory remarks. Think about that. The usual victor is gracious — why not be? — and the usual victory speech dignified, but when Trump acts in accordance with those adjectives, it’s man-bites-dog.
There’s a rationale for the nastiness. My Times Opinion colleague Zeynep Tufekci, who recently interviewed scores of Trump voters, explained in a column last weekend that they regard his “penchant for insults” as proof that he’s uniquely “strong and honest enough” to say out loud what other politicians want but don’t have the nerve to. He’s not indecent. He’s authentic and unbowed.
I guess that’s what Matt Gaetz was going for back when he was tormenting Kevin McCarthy and bringing the government to a halt. To some of his constituents, he wasn’t a preening punk. He was a righteous hell-raiser, just like Marjorie Taylor Greene, for whom nastiness is less trait than creed. The two of them are high priests (of a sort) in their party. Says everything about the new religion.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Washington Post, Emily Heil fashioned a pungent opening to her examination of kooky brand partnerships that produce such monstrosities as personal care products bearing a baked-goods scent: “Have you ever paused, halfway through destroying a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies, and thought to yourself, ‘Ya know, I wish my armpits could smell just like this?’” (Thanks to Sarah Morisseau Lee of Orinda, Calif., for the nomination.)
Also in The Washington Post, Ron Charles continued his righteous pushback against the banning and censoring of books — and he found fresh outrage in one Florida county’s move against several reference volumes: “Apparently, Webster’s wasn’t the only dictionary investigated for signs of… what? Maybe putting ‘black’ before ‘white’ violates Florida’s ban on critical race theory. Any day now, Moms for Liberty will demand that parents — not some globalist alphabet — should determine the order of words.” (Simon McGill, Canberra, Australia)
And Amanda Ripley flagged the ways in which us-versus-them, good-versus-evil thinking traps and limits us: “Bright lines have a way of hardening into prison bars.” (Jennifer Siegel, Durham, N.C.)
In The Athletic, Steve Buckley chronicled the news conference that marked the parting of the New England Patriots’ longtime coach and the team’s owner: “First Bill Belichick spoke, and then Robert Kraft spoke. What followed was not a bear hug between these pro football titans, which is surely what the photographers craved, but a barely hug. It was like two cars trying to back into a parking space at the same time, with a start, a stop, maybe a small tap, followed by one of the cars driving away.” (Scott Millstein, Manhattan)
In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay also memorialized Belichick’s departure from the Patriots and shuddered at the thought of him coaching another team: “I don’t really care to see Belichick trying to be sunny in Southern California with the Chargers, or taking the wheel of another forlorn franchise like the Falcons or Commanders. To me he will always be the Grumpy Lobster Boat Captain, grimacing on the New England sideline like he’s miles from shore in a storm. Today the lighthouse is lit, the harbor empty. Bill Belichick is out to sea.” (James Brockardt, Pennington, N.J., and Thomas M. Paciello, Yonkers, N.Y., among others)
On CNN.com, Jasmine Wright and Edward-Isaac Dovere deconstructed the jitters about Vice President Kamala Harris: “Any running mate is a heartbeat away from the presidency, they say, but that’s a different proposition when the heart in question has been beating for more than 80 years.” (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)
In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce ribbed a certain former governor of South Carolina for her wishful, self-flattering spin on the caucus results: “Let us not be poor Nikki Haley, who marked her third-place victory by doing a spot-on imitation of the Black Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” (“It’s only a flesh wound.”) (Melissa Guensler, Fredericksburg, Texas)
In The Times, Lisa Donovan validated my own strongly positive feelings about a criminally caloric concoction of the South, pimento cheese, “a kind of grand and final submission to the mayonnaise gods.” She continued: “Not liking pimento cheese for whatever incorrect reason feels like complaining about a murmuration of birds collecting in the sky or a cat’s sitting on your lap. Go ahead and moan about the bird poop on your car or the cat hair on your pants. I’ll light a candle for you next time I’m thinking about lost souls.” (Stacey Somppi, Cottonwood, Ariz.)
Also in The Times, Leah Greenblatt shared a lesson from her past: “In junior high school, it has been empirically proved, freak flags are best flown at lower altitudes.” (Phyllis Eide, Spokane, Wash.)
Bret Stephens pondered Trump’s possible return to the White House. “Imagine some future historian summing up the Biden presidency this way: ‘Our long national nightmare wasn’t over; it was merely an intermission,’” he wrote. (Martha Mantikoski, Calgary, Alberta)
Maureen Dowd saw a connection between the forecasts of ungodly weather and an ungodly winner for the vote in Iowa: “That it’s happening in a blizzard is fitting. Trump’s whole life has been a snow job.” (Pat Whaley, Jupiter, Fla., and Stephen McIntyre, Clyde Hill, Wash.)
And Jesse McKinley explained that in real life as opposed to the movies, a good killer-for-hire who doesn’t botch the job is hard to find: “The non-hits just keep on coming.” (Jeff Atlas, San Francisco, and Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)
Finally, in The Cincinnati Business Courier, Nikki Kingery pushed back at attempts to rebrand January as a revivifying passage of physical and emotional detox: “People are so busy embracing self-denial you can’t sling a mocktail these days without hitting someone rambling on about the transcendent joy of scrubbing clean your mind, body and spirit. For the record, I’m never going to cozy up to the first month of the year. It is, and will forever remain, 31 days I must simply endure. ‘Whatever gets you through the darkness’ is my winter motto. For me, that often means leaning into it — dark mysteries, dark chocolate and dark beer.” (Dave Caudill, Cincinnati)
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.
What I’m Doing, Reading and Writing
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 5, my Times Opinion colleague Nicholas Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, will be appearing at Duke University; I’ll join him onstage to ask him about world events, American politics, the 2024 election and more. The event is free and open to the public. Find details here.
Americans who don’t support Trump still struggle to understand his hold on so many voters. Three recent Times Opinion pieces — the one by Zeynep Tufekci that I mentioned earlier, along with others by Bret Stephens and by Roger Lowenstein — separately and together did an excellent job of explaining his appeal, both in general and right now.
Iowa is over. New Hampshire looms — and when the political strategist Mike Murphy and the pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson joined me for this online political round table, published in The Times on Monday, we spoke as much about that state and about the presidential election at large as we did about what would happen in the curtain-raising caucuses.
Nikki Haley’s recent surge — which wasn’t enough to loft her to second place in Iowa — has often obscured her faults. Mark Leibovich did an especially deft job of detailing some of those in this article in The Atlantic.
On a Personal (By Which I Mean Regan) Note
In less than two weeks, Regan turns 10. Do I make doggy cupcakes? Invite the neighborhood pooches to a party? Double her usual minutes of belly rubs for the day? I’d be courting carpal tunnel.
She hasn’t lost her zip. She can still get from here to the nearest squirrel in 3.62 seconds. Still has the eye-snout coordination to catch any and every squeaky ball that I throw her way and the jaw strength to make its squeal audible for miles. Can still pantomime enough fierceness to make deer scatter, although the ones most familiar with the woods around us no longer flee as quickly or as far as they once did. They’re on to her. She’s in it for fun, not supper.
But she rests longer between bursts of energy. She has always been a champion sleeper; now she’s a fanged, four-legged Van Winkle. A few years ago, we’d usually be out the door by 7 a.m. for our morning walk. Twice over the past week, I roused her just before noon because I was the one impatient to get going.
On one of those days, we exited the house to find a crystalline sky, sublimely brisk air, sunshine. Though she’d slumbered more than 15 hours, she found the nearest patch of sun-kissed grass and stretched out on it, as if lounging poolside. I swear she expected me to fetch her a piña colada.
So maybe cocktails for her birthday? I mean, of course, for me. She can chew on one of her favorite flavored bones, showing a bit of industry between naps, and I’ll offer a toast: to a creature whose gentleness and capacity for joy have at times been a lifesaver, and to as many more years together as we can possibly have.
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