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Bruni: Donald Trump, Prince of Self-Pity [1]

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Date: 2024-08-08  

Frank Bruni is, as usual, spot-on with this excellent piece in NYT today. Enjoy your schadenfreude.

Once a week Bruni attaches to his column another piece, For the Love of Sentences. My wife & I always enjoy the wordplay he curates from various journalists and other folk.

I’ve mentioned before that there are some great OpEd writers at NYT, and I kept my subscription for a long time because of them. I canceled in disgust months ago, partly prompted by some of you fine DKosers. My wife decides for herself and kept hers. So I still get to share this Gift Link with you.

www.nytimes.com/…

Excerpts:

...Prince of Self-Pity

The size of the crowd at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta last month rivaled the turnout for Donald Trump days later only “because she had entertainers,” Trump told the audience at his event, referring to the rappers Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion. “I don’t need entertainers.”

Translation: Harris cheated. Even so, she didn’t get the better of him.

She isn’t really Black but “happened to turn Black” over the course of her political career. That’s what Trump said at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, insinuating that Harris had performed a melanin metamorphosis and was falsely improvising identities to contrive some perk unavailable to him.

Poor Trump. Always forced to compete on an uneven playing field.

Of all his feats of projection, which is psychology’s term for seeing your own methods and motivations in someone else, none fascinates me more than his incessant insistence that every one of his adversaries — that everyone, period — is the beneficiary of some scheme or scam that puts him at a disadvantage. If he triumphs nonetheless? It’s a testament to his peerless might. If he doesn’t? It was never a fair fight.

He’s the prince of self-pity, the bard of bellyaching, reportedly worked up over the imagined injustice or trickery of Harris’s late replacement of President Biden on the Democratic ticket. According to an article in The Washington Post this week, he told an ally: “It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her, too.”

For the Love of Sentences:

On NPR’s website, Linda Holmes had a strong reaction to recent ads for Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant, that promoted its use for writing: “The marketing of generative A.I. is a broadside against singularity in favor of digestibility, against creativity in favor of drudgery. It’s perfect for anyone who watched the video for Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ and rooted for the meat grinder.” (Thanks to Chris Curtis of Midland, Mich., for nominating this.)

In The Atlantic, a recent roundup of excellent movies that are only about 90 minutes long included a mini-review by Damon Beres of “Notes on a Scandal,” which stars Judi Dench as a boundlessly bitter teacher: “Dench is almost unrecognizable in the role; she’s done up like a raisin you’d find lodged between your couch cushions, and about half as pleasant to behold.” (Karin Lagerson, Philadelphia, and Jean Lindsay, Prescott, Ariz., among others)

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