No. of Recommendations: 16
Kristen Welker, the anchor of the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” wanted to know if Vice President JD Vance thought the war in Gaza was really and durably over.
Vance wanted to proclaim the majesty of President Trump and shame her network for failing to recognize it.
That’s how their interview roughly a week ago began. That’s the first 75 seconds. Vance reprimanded NBC News for not reporting that at a rally in Israel the previous night, people cheered Trump and his diplomatic brilliance. Vance gushed: “He actually broke the mold.” After, apparently, breaking Vance’s dignity.
Trump, you see, is “brave.” Trump, you must understand, is “incredible.” How do I know? Kash Patel said so.
On Wednesday, the F.B.I. director participated in a White House news conference during which he interspersed a recitation of crime statistics with exultations of gratitude to — and reverence for — the president. That’s when and where the “brave” and the “incredible” came in, along with Patel’s declaration that Trump had already made inroads against violent crime that “would be historic for a four-year presidency.”
Trump stood just feet away, an emperor gorging on his encomiums.
He’s insatiable, and the prevalence of his attendants’ gooey hooey has not only turned it into something expected but also obscured its strangeness — and its cause for concern. There’s no team of rivals around Trump, no constructive dissent, no battle of ideas from which the best one emerges. There’s just flattery and more flattery. Tribute upon tribute. Hyperbole atop hyperbole.
Of course, telling bosses how effective, charismatic and visionary they are is a tried and true route to advancement. And telling all the world about a politician’s underappreciated gifts is a bona fide profession — and a lucrative one at that. To cover a political campaign is to have an armada of operatives whisper sweet superlatives about their candidates in your ear.
But the sort of fanboy fan dances that Vance and Patel routinely perform? That’s extreme. As was Attorney General Pam Bondi’s pathetic effort, during a Senate hearing in which she was fielding questions, to make Democrats on the panel answer for their supposed crimes against Trump. How, she wondered, could they be so mean to him? How, I wondered, does she keep a straight face?
I guess practice makes perfect, and she’s a veteran of those cabinet meetings and Oval Office events that are essentially television roasts turned inside out. The person at the mic doesn’t hurl insults at the guest of honor in the hopes of laughter. He or she lavishes the head of state with praise so overwrought it’s unintentionally hilarious.
If that lip service were merely the ceremonial price that Trump’s aides paid to be able to attend to the rest of their jobs in a serious manner, it would be little more than embarrassing. But it’s part of a broader servility, a more profound humiliation. Their deeds must match their diction.
So Bondi has either encouraged or indulged nuisance investigations and malicious prosecutions of Trump’s enemies, including James Comey and Letitia James. Patel expanded polygraph tests at the F.B.I. — to prevent pejorative portrayals of the administration from leaking out. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth channeled Trump’s contempt for independent journalists and emulated Trump’s attacks on the media by laying down new rules that essentially forced self-respecting reporters to hand in their Pentagon press credentials. The president was pleased: He wondered aloud about doing something similar at the White House.
Maybe Patel and Hegseth were always this paranoid and petulant. But Bondi seems to have grown crueler and coarser in direct relation to her time with Trump, and Vance’s cartoonish sycophancy is the convenient inverse of his past statements that Trump was “America’s Hitler” and an “idiot.”
He and Bondi are demonstrating a scary talent for deference, a spooky willingness to bend any which way to win and hold on to Trump’s favor. They want so badly to be in the room where it happens that they’re content to be throw pillows.
I’m stumped. If you owe your lofty station to your lax scruples and if your power hinges on your obeisance, what power do you really have? What pride?
And what’s next? Will I look up someday soon and see Patel feeding Trump grapes, one by one, while Vance, with a white linen napkin, wipes the corners of the president’s mouth? It wouldn’t shock me. But it would put me off fruit.
——Frank Bruni, New York Times
