Frank Bruni: Canada, a previously close ally of ours with less than one-eighth of our population and less than one-tenth of our gross domestic product, just made clear that it won’t be bullied by us and has contempt for what we’ve become. Iran makes a daily mockery of our unhinged overlord’s immature predictions of a lickety-split war and premature declarations of an easy-peasy victory. Could President Trump, so obsessed with his potency, be making the United States look any weaker, Bret? Is he the pompous proof that the era of American dominance is done?
Bret Stephens: Wasn’t it Teddy Roosevelt who said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick”? Trump’s presidency, if not his whole life, amounts to an inversion of the phrase.
Frank: As you made wisely and scarily clear in your most recent column, his speaking loudly while carrying a puny strand of spaghetti is more than a national embarrassment. It’s an opening — for Russia, for China, for a world order in which our say and sway are gravely diminished. Is this a phase? Or is it something more profound?
Bret: Trump is putting America in a position that Niccolò Machiavelli warned all princes against: We are hated, but not feared. That’s not just among enemies like Iran or China, whose rulers carefully watch the U.S. for signs of indecision and weakness. It’s also among our closest friends and allies, Canada chief among them. That said, I really do think that this is a phase related to Trump’s unique awfulness, which expires politically on Jan. 20, 2029. I hope Canadians and other allies bear with America through this period of temporary insanity before we regain our bearings, moral as well as political. Or am I too sanguine?
Frank: I desperately want to agree with you, because I love this country and have so often been proud of it and think we’ve done such enormous good and want us to do yet more of it. But in my gut? You’re too sanguine. Trump strikes me not as an aberration who had the luck of flawed opponents, a feckless Democratic Party and a system in which the Electoral College rather than the popular vote decides presidential elections, which is of course how he won in 2016. He’s an expression of America’s id and a reflection of its uncorking. He rose as — and because — so many Americans stopped appreciating our blessings and started wallowing in our resentments. He’s the sign that we summited and have begun the descent. That’s my worry, at least, but I’ve always been someone who girds for the absolute worst so that I can be pleasantly surprised when the merely disappointing happens.
Bret: There’s no doubt Trump has taken advantage of something ugly in the American soul: A few years ago, I compared his relationship to the Republican base like that of a burlesque performer who, with one discarded piece of clothing after another, brings out the inner lewdness of an audience. But I also think, or rather know, that Americans disapprove of his presidency by a wide and growing margin; that Democrats are likely to win back one or probably both houses of Congress in November; that most of us treasure the idea of America as a city on a hill, a destination and an ideal.
That’s not gone.
Frank: But if America’s insistently aggrieved citizens can’t agree on who gets to enter and try to prosper in that hilltop city? If different camps have irreconcilably different versions of the America they treasure? That’s what feeds my dread.
Bret: I keep returning to a line in Bill Clinton’s first Inaugural Address: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” I believe in my bones that it’s true. Historically speaking, we’ve been worse (the Jim Crow South), done worse (Japanese internment; the evils committed against Native Americans), messed up worse (the Smoot-Hawley tariff and Neutrality acts of the 1930s), and even elected worse (James Buchanan, though Trump may be giving our worst president a run for the money).
We’ve even made the exact same mistakes. My son and I are reading Rick Atkinson’s magnificent account of the early years of the American Revolution, “The British Are Coming,” with its description of our failed attempt to conquer Canada in 1775. My guess is that this third attempt of ours (the second came in 1812) to conquer our hardy northern friends will end much the same way.
Frank: While the individual components of the argument you just made are apt and accurate, I have a problem with the whole we’ve-survived-darker-days line of defense that has been trotted out incessantly over the Trump years. It’s too seductive, too convenient, too obvious.
Bret: Obviousness is not necessarily a defect. Sorry, go on.
Frank: We’ve-seen-worse surely says as much about our desire for reassurance as it does about the actual state of play. Also, our present world is different in ways that weaken historical analogies. I mentioned our fractiousness a bit ago; the internet intensifies that, amplifies it, creates warring truths and pollutes the information ecosystem as little if anything before it did.
Bret: I just had the wonderful experience of spending some time in Abilene, Kan., three miles from the middle of nowhere off I-70, at the Eisenhower presidential library, museum and childhood home. On one hand, it brought home the stark contrast between Eisenhower’s kind of Republican presidency and Trump’s. On the other, I was reminded that, at the time, a lot of Americans saw the country and its culture in dire straits — and also dismissed the president as an idiot.
Frank: That last reminder is an excellent one. I remember when everyone around me was freaking out about the singular horror of Ronald Reagan. Then about the singular horror of George W. Bush. Now those same people wish fervently that Trump was more like either of those predecessors of his.
That said, I don’t think, 20 years from now, many people beyond the cronies whose net worth Trump quintupled will be nostalgic for him or this wretched chapter of American life.
Bret: I’m sure you’re right. Reagan had unsuspected tenderness. Bush had obvious decency. Trump’s inner life is a mangy hollow.
Can I change the subject to something a little closer to (your) home?
Frank: Does that mean I’ll have a home-field advantage? Then, sure!
Bret: Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist at Penn, has a terrific guest essay in The Times this week on the subject of how to get college students to stop using A.I. to cheat. His message: Returning to blue book exams isn’t enough; students need an ethical education to understand why integrity matters. Since you teach at a university, tell me what does, or doesn’t, work.
Frank: What works best — and his essay also hints at this — is lowering the stakes. I can’t be sure which or how many of my students at Duke cheat. I’m confident that a very large percentage don’t. But I get the sense that the more stressed they feel and the more selective their desired job or graduate school is, the more they feel entitled or even obliged to cheat. There’s a larger context and problem here: We want colleges to be theaters of learning, but they function just as much as theaters of culling. Those are warring, contradictory dynamics. And within that contradiction, cheating flourishes.
Bret: Completely contradictory. And I wish I could tell every undergraduate in America that what their future employers will value most is not a high G.PA. — we’re all aware of grade inflation, anyway — but a demonstrated aptitude for hard work and learning from mistakes. I still have a folder with most of my college essays, and they are terrible. I became a better writer because, not despite, that convoluted, overstuffed prose. I set out to learn from my mistakes, which first required me to make them, then recognize them, finally, and most arduously, to improve. Depriving students of that opportunity is one of the chief evils of A.I.
Frank: Agreed. Part of what’s so frustrating is that students really do want to learn to be better writers — I see this in just about all of them — but they feel that a brutally competitive world puts a dangerously high price on mistakes. As a result, many of them do their best to avoid courses that require extensive writing.
Duke pushes back. It in fact requires first-year students in its college of arts and sciences to take a writing seminar, but to add a spoonful of sugar to that medicine, Duke lets them choose among surprising, amusing, quirky themes. One such option in recent years? A writing course titled “Dolly Parton for President?”
Bret: Bringing us to the most important, and by far the saddest, news of the week. I’m struck by how hard the news of her death hit me. I remember as a kid, watching “9 to 5” in a theater, and falling for the force of her personality. But it was only when I had kids of my own — particularly my daughters, who are into country music — that I really began to love the songs, like “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors,” not just for their musicality but their emotional honesty and depth. Also, if you’ve never heard it, watch Parton, with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, cover Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” in this 1999 performance on David Letterman. It’ll bring you to tears.
Frank: Oh, I’ve heard it. Seen it. Misted up during it. But to me and many others, Dolly Parton was so much more than music and movies. What I perhaps appreciated most about her, Bret, was this: I had no idea what her politics were. I barely had guesses. And while keeping them opaque obviously worked to her commercial advantage, minimizing the possibility that she’d anger and estrange any fans, it came to seem a kind of moral statement: We can have pockets of space and periods of grace in which we savor a shared pleasure and put our differences and our rancor on pause. Her performances were that pause, that space, that grace.
