Donald Trump is diverse.
Are you a black voter outraged by criminal justice inequality? He feels your pain. He knows your pain. Recently, in a Manhattan courtroom, he faced the same situation you face. The same unfair situation, the same disrespect. At least, that's the view Trump's allies have been promoting ever since juries handed him “guilty” 34 times.
The East Coast elites look down on you and the big bad Fed tries to suppress any action you take or word you utter in defiance? He does too! When the Feds came to retrieve the classified documents scattered like pennies all over Mar-a-Lago, they were really after you. They used Trump to teach you a lesson and flaunt their contempt for you by indicting him. He has made that claim many times.
In a fundraising email sent by his campaign last week, Trump said, “If we don't get massive patriotic support here and now, they will get rid of me and move on to the real target – YOU!!”
And what about the latest references to Jesus Christ by Trump and his followers? There's no ambiguity or subtlety there. He's dying for your sins — well, he's having a rough time with huge legal fees — but you can always make it better by buying a $59.99 Trump-branded Bible.
“Trump's transformation from person to symbol is key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement,” Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Institute, said in a Substack post this month, headlined “Trump Totem.”
Jones correctly acknowledged that Trump’s transformation has intensified since his felony conviction on May 30, but the audacious, comical and shockingly successful project of transforming the wealthy, idiosyncratic playboy into a common man has been central and defining of his political rise from the start.
It's a shaky endeavor that has been undermined time and again by Trump's penchant for high-rises and clothes with dense threads. Just this week, as Michael Gold reported for The Times, Trump was forced to change his lodgings for next month's Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after reporters inquired and learned that he had initially chosen the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, about 90 miles away. Trump has now scrapped that itinerary and opted for the city and state of Chicago, the actual site of his coronation. Here's hoping he finds the pampering and swaddling he needs.
Many presidents have cast themselves as symbols to spread their message and broaden their influence. President Barack Obama portrayed the marriage of his Kenyan-born father to his Kansas-born mother as the quintessential American story. President Bill Clinton was presented as a “man of hope” for emotional reasons, not primarily geographical ones (the city in Arkansas where he was born). Because of this, he became a symbol of American optimism and aspiration.
But Trump had a special need to transform himself into an icon. He needed to close the gap between his natural habitat of golden plateaus and lush fairways and the squalid earth on which most other humans walk. He needed to feel close, to assert common ground. His deliberately and unjustifiably vulgar remarks, and the subsequent outcry when critics predictably denounced them, played on the sense among many Americans that they could not speak their minds or even ask carelessly worded questions without fear of punishment.
Trump deliberately provoked the very people they dreamed of challenging, purposefully blaming the social changes that made them anxious and uncomfortable. He was, and still is, more than their spokesman: he is their repressed ego.
Symbolic resonance helps Trump in another important way: it allows voters to redirect focus from Trump's amoral, deranged reality to a larger meaning, as if they could step back from a pointillist painting and see a coherent image, a grand pattern, not the individual, seemingly messy brushstrokes. Trump the womanizer, Trump the conman, Trump the felon becomes Trump the rebellious, Trump the disruptor, Trump the martyr. The sordid story told in a Manhattan courtroom undergoes a grand revision, giving Trump a new role. He's not Weaklones. He's Braveheart.
And he is always the victim: the corrupt and arrogant forces that are rallying against him and that many of his supporters believe are against them.
“I am your retribution,” he said last year at the start of his current campaign. The words will endure not only because they evoke anger and call for revenge, but also because they express his main strategy in four blunt words: “I am your vessel. I am your agent. You should see your own reflection in me.”
It's a trick mirror.
For the love of writing
Mike Freeman of USA Today pushed back against some Republicans politicizing the exclusion of Kaitlyn Clark from the U.S. women's basketball team for the Paris Olympics, saying, “They don't know basketball. They think security guards are people who will run over the Capitol.” (Thanks to Olivia Rasmussen of Baltimore for recommending this story.)
Olivia Nuzzi and Andrew Rice of New York magazine recounted the exchanges between Trump and Michael Cohen during Trump's recent trial: “On social media, Trump called his former subordinate a 'jail inmate' and a 'scumbag.' In retaliation, Cohen called Trump a 'Von Shits-in-Pants' and a 'Cheetos-covered cartoon villain.' It wasn't 'Gone with the Wind.'” (Russell Lacey, Durham, North Carolina)
In a Washington Post column about 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 Comish, Los Angeles).
In a Substack post, Joe Poznanski said about Willie Mays' relationship with his accolades and fame: “Even Mays himself never fully understood it. 'I was just playing baseball,' he said, with tears in his eyes, when another fan called out to him. In a way, this was true. He was just playing baseball. Robert Frost was just writing poetry. Grace Kelly was just acting in movies. Albert Einstein was just thinking about the universe.” (Brian McConnell, Cincinnati)
Joseph Bernstein of The Times describes a man who has been working his way through higher education for more than 30 years: “There's something anachronistically earnest, even romantic, about the reasons he has spent the last 30 years trying to get a college degree. 'I love to learn,' he told me over lunch last year, without a trace of irony. For nearly two days I pressed him for a deeper explanation of his life as a perpetual student, from every conceivable angle. Each time, I felt hopelessly 21st-century, like an extra in a historical drama who forgot to take off his Apple Watch.” (Stephanie Zarpas, Annapolis, Maryland; Joshua Bress, Cupertino, California; et al.)
Also in the Times, musician and author Dessa recalled a particularly unsettling doctor's visit: “A physician's assistant shoved a thin tube equipped with a camera down my nostrils and snaked it down my throat to search for any visible cause of my symptoms. When the tube was removed a minute later, I shuddered. Believe it or not, it felt like a part of me was being removed, or a shrimp being deveined.” (Lisa Clemons Stott, Springfield, Illinois)
And Pete Wells has a legitimate takedown of the dreaded annual list of supposedly the best restaurants on earth: “They are not restaurants, not just restaurants. They are endurance tests, dramatic spectacles, monuments of self-worth, and, the two most dreaded words in dining, 'immersive experiences.' There's no way to know whether World's 50 Best seeks these grandiose spectacles or has simply been hijacked. The list's website is a model to be studied by anyone who wants to string together important-sounding but meaningless words.” (Dick Hughes, Raleigh, Massachusetts, Peter J. Commerford, Providence, Rhode Island)
To nominate your favorite recent articles from The Times or other publications for inclusion in “For the Love of Sentences,” email us here and tell us your name and where you live.
I'm in the kitchen and I'm 99% sure Regan is in the family room next door. Last I checked she was there in her dog bed. I hear the distinctive rustling sound that comes from her getting out of bed and then maybe 4 seconds later I hear something else. I'm not sure what. It sounds like a large object being dragged or pushed. Then there's silence.
Hmm. I'll go and check. Regan's nowhere to be seen. Oddly, I didn't hear her leave the living room. I looked around and saw a patch of black hair poking out from a recess in the bottom of the coffee table that she'd cleverly converted into a cave.
She's like a kid in a makeshift fort. Genius. So why hasn't she claimed this place before? Maybe she did and I wasn't around or paying attention.
Or maybe you can teach an older dog a new routine.
Words are like lovers: when a new one comes along, we're tickled, we're obsessed, we can't believe how beautifully it's integrated into our lives, and we never tire of the word. Until we do. The shock and joy of a word comes from the unexpected and is eroded by overexposure.
Dear “Curate”, we will always treasure our memories, but we ask that you return our keys and promise to forward your email.
I don't know exactly when “curate” made the leap from a verb used primarily in art exhibitions to one used in other contexts, but the first time it happened, I thought, “How clever. How refreshing.” “Curate” instead of “select,” “Curate” instead of “gather” or “display” or “arrange” or “screen.” Chefs curate flavors. Tour planners curate experiences. It smelled sophisticated.
But as the number of curators increased, curation metastasized: it began to smell pretentious and, eventually, of terrible imitation.
“I don't want a salad specially curated for bean lovers,” Lisa C. Stewart of Boise, Idaho, wrote me recently, urging me to remove the phrase. “Walmart sent me a new shopping list, but said it was curated from my past purchases.”
“The host at my favorite classical music radio station 'curates' the playlist,” said Pat Summers of Lawrenceville, New Jersey. She noted that she recently read an article in another newspaper that ended with a link to three additional articles that had been 'hand-curated' for her. “I hope you'll consider incorporating this language into your curation of material for your column,” she wrote to me.
Stephen Miller of Reston, Virginia, echoed her complaint, as did dozens of other newsletter readers, and he pointed me to a Wall Street Journal essay he wrote about the overuse of the word. “Are you curating?” his piece begins. “A growing number of Americans are doing just that. In the past month, I've read about people curating wine, beer, tea and coffee beans. According to a psychology professor, Facebook is 'curating the news and information you want to keep seeing.'”
Miller didn't stop the flow. His article was published in December 2017. When I searched for “curate” on news sources in 2018, it got about 36,900 hits. When I did the same search in 2023, it got 140,000 hits.
Enough is enough. Here is my pledge: I will never refer to For the Love of Sentences as a special curation of prose, but merely a diversion for readers who appreciate well-chosen words (not an overused phrase, is it?).
“Retire These Words!”, formerly known as “Words Worth Sidelining,” is an occasional feature that has appeared every few months for the past couple of years. Many readers only started reading it when it first began, and you can see why, because you've already submitted suggestions for words and phrases that we've covered. So here are links to past newsletters in which it has appeared. I've written about (or maybe criticized) “what it is,” “great,” “after all,” “long story short,” “reveal,” nonsensical dog metaphors, phrases that political journalists overuse, more phrases that political journalists overuse, the verb “Trump,” modifiers like “iconic,” “existential,” “handmade,” and “honestly.” And more to come.
In memoriam
Chef James Kent, whose career has reached remarkable new heights over the past five years, suffered a heart attack and passed away suddenly on Saturday at age 45. I got to know him a little bit in the years since I stopped reviewing restaurants, and I was repeatedly touched by his kindness and generosity. Please read his obituary by Alex Traub in The Times, and know that in an industry filled with hypocrites and self-indulgences, he was neither. He brought a great deal of talent and grace to everything he did.
