Trump Jumps the Shark

Plus: Two-and-a-half cheers for Paul Ryan

In today’s unscheduled, random, irregular edition, I have some brief thoughts on Paul Ryan, Mrs. Alito, Donald Trump and sharks, and a beloved classic movie that is actually pretty awful.

But first (as you’ve been warned), we have some the obligatory dog pictures.

Auggie had some minor eye surgery, so he needs a cone to keep him from scratching his eye. We’ve tried a number of options. This was the first, which Auggie not only disliked, but promptly shredded, GSD-style.

**

This was followed by a softer and darker version, which has led his mom to refer to him as Darth Auggie. As you can see, nothing — and I mean nothing — interferes with his demand that I throw him the damn ball.

**

Since he really, really hates the cones, we did try something else. But I regret to tell you that the goggles were a FAIL, because he wouldn’t keep them on.

**

Then there’s the yellow ring, which he kinda, sorta liked. Or at least tolerated. But it didn’t stop him from scratching.

**

But at least he got lots of love from his little (actually much bigger) brother, Eli.

..

P.S. He’s going to be fine.

Two-and-a-half cheers for Paul Ryan

As you probably know, Paul and I go way back — although lately we’ve been taking a break and seeing other people.

I haven’t made any secret of my disappointment with his surrender to Trump, and I had him in mind when I opened “How the Right Lost Its Mind” with Yeat’s words: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

A while back I wrote him an open letter: “Paul Ryan, It’s Time for You to Stand Up to Fox - POLITICO” and I handed him a copy when we met a year ago at our (rather contentious) one-on-one conversation.

I’ve also had some harsh critiques of his rationalizations for appeasing Trump.

After Donald Trump’s election, Ryan made the calculation that it was better to be in the room than to defy a president he knew was manifestly unfit.

To publicly criticize Trump, the former speaker told Mark Leibovich in 2018, would just be counterproductive.

He tends to speak of the commander in chief as if he were sharing a coping strategy on dealing with a Ritalin-deprived child. “It boomerangs,” Ryan says of being too critical of Trump. “He goes in the other direction, so that’s not effective.” He added, “The pissing match doesn’t work.”

So he opted to stay in the room, telling Leibovich that he preferred to tell Trump how he felt in private, rather than speaking out about his recklessness, racism, and serial lies. Staying quiet meant that Ryan would stay relevant, stay in the game, and, as he told himself, stop all sorts of awful things from happening.

He was hardly alone. Wrote Leibovich:

He joins a large group of Trump’s putative allies, many of whom have worked in the administration, who insist that they have shaped Trump’s thinking and behavior in private: the “Trust me, I’ve stopped this from being much worse” approach. “I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy,” Ryan tells me. “I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal.”

I locked in on the word “tragedy.” It sets the mind reeling to whatever thwarted “tragedies” Ryan might be talking about. I asked for an example. “No, I don’t want to do that,” Ryan replied. “That’s more than I usually say.”

This was, of course, the basis of Ryan’s Faustian bargain, but it also reflects a mindset that has come to dominate our politics, especially in the GOP.

The right’s political culture now relies on this hive-mind rationalization that masquerades as a philosophy: That you can serve the greater good by staying silent — in the room — and therefore relevant.

Despite my excellent advice, Ryan still sits on the Fox board, but he has now decided that he is absolutely, thoroughly, and completely done with Trump and all his works. And this week he went on Fox News to put an exclamation point on that break, declaring that the former president is unfit for office.

Host Neil Cavuto read him some of his remarks in which Ryan called Trump an “authoritarian narcissist” and lacked the character for the job.

“That’s pretty strong,” Cavuto said.

“That’s the way I feel,” Ryan replied. “I voted for him in 2016, hoping that there was gonna be a different kind of person in office. And I do think character is a really important issue. If you put yourself above the Constitution as he has done that shows you’re unfit for office.”

“But what happened?” the host asked. “What turned you? Was it the whole January 6 thing?”

“That’s a part of it,” he answered. Ryan reiterated that Trump has placed himself above the Constitution and repeated that Trump is “unfit for office.”

Like former Vice President Mike Pence, however, he cannot bring himself to vote for Joe Biden, which, I know, will lead critics to say that Ryan’s conversion is too little, too late, and inadequate to the moment.

Obviously, I disagree with Paul on this one. The reality is that in November, either Trump or Biden will be elected president — so that is the choice that confronts us, no matter how we feel about it.

But I also know that this sort of thing is not easy. Ryan knows what repudiating Trump means for his future in GOP politics, and he has no illusions about the blowback he will get from Trump’s troglodytic hordes. Like this:

In other worlds, welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys, Paul.

Sam Alito’s Problem

Probably the best defense of Justice Samuel Alito is that he has a Martha Mitchell problem. No one can be held responsible for the views of their spouse, but it is perhaps worth remembering how that all worked out for John Mitchell. (If you don’t get any of these references, you probably should read up on Watergate.)

Recent revelations suggest that the justice was probably telling the truth when he blamed the upside-down flag on his wife. “‘My wife is fond of flying flags,” he said. And indeed, she is, as she explained in an extraordinary conversation captured on tape a few days ago.

As usual, Mona Charen has the most thoughtful and thorough analysis of the latest Alito contretemps.

Asked about the flags she flew over their Virginia and New Jersey homes, Martha-Ann Alito was caustic. “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the pride flag for the next month.”

Sorry, but having to see symbols and language you disagree with is the basic requirement of life in a free society. Also, Mrs. Alito’s anger about it seems grossly misplaced. If someone were flying a swastika or hammer-and-sickle flag (which would also be legal), her rage would be understandable. But the pride flag?

The most important thing you’ll read this week

Anne Applebaum: Trump Is Not America’s Le Pen. He’s worse.

Donald Trump is not like these politicians. The former president is not tacking to the center, and he is not trying to appear less confrontational. Nor does he seek to embrace existing alliances. On the contrary, almost every day he sounds more extreme, more unhinged, and more dangerous.

Meloni has not inspired her followers to block the results of an election. Le Pen does not rant about retribution and revenge.

Wilders has agreed to be part of a coalition government, meaning that he can compromise with other political leaders, and has promised to put his notorious hostility to Muslims “on ice.”

Even Orbán, who has gone the furthest in destroying his country’s institutions and who has rewritten Hungary’s constitution to benefit himself, doesn’t brag openly about wanting to be an autocrat.

Trump does.

People around him speak openly about wanting to destroy American democracy too. None of this seems to hurt him with voters, who appear to welcome this destructive, radical extremism, or at least not to mind it.

American media clichés about Europe are wrong. In fact, the European far right is rising in some places, but falling in others. And we aren’t “in danger” of following European voters in an extremist direction, because we are already well past them. If Trump wins in November, America could radicalize Europe, not the other way around.

**

Trump’s shark attack

Save this for your files. You can show it to your kids someday. At a campaign rally in Nevada in June 2024, the former president of the United States shared some of his thoughts:

“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’

“By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? Lot of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks, they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming.’ No, really got decimated, and other people, too, a lot of shark attacks.

“So I said, ‘There’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards, or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer.

“He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks.”

What I’m watching

I took the advice of The Atlantic’s Rina Li and watched Say Anything, which really did hold up quite well.

It’s the rare depiction of young love as serious and courtly, with Lloyd Dobler (played by John Cusack) more Arthurian knight than ’80s-rom-com heartthrob. “One question,” he says to the aptly named Diane Court (Ione Skye) when she begs him to take her back. “Are you here ’cause you need someone or ’cause you need me?” A second later: “Forget it, I don’t care.”

This piqued my interest in finding out whether other "classics” of the period had also aged well, so I decided to try out 16 Candles. I went in with the best possible attitude, prepared to bathe in nostalgia, good humor, and romance. And I expected to thoroughly enjoy it.

I didn’t.

In fact — and I really regret saying this — Sixteen Candles has not aged well at all.

In fact, it’s actually pretty awful.

I won’t say that I didn’t laugh, or that I didn’t think Molly Ringwald was charming (she is). But at its heart, this is a cruel film.

I’m not willing to go as far as this critic — Why John Hughes' Sixteen Candles Hasn't Aged Well Since The '80s — and I understand the pitfalls of applying wokist sensibilities to something made in the Eighties. But even at the time — and it came back to me — I knew that there was a lot wrong here.

• The cruel description of the young girl played by Joan Cusack, who wears a neck brace. No sympathy, no kindness. Her awkwardness and humiliation are just played for laughs; and the laughter is… cruel.

• The blatant (and cringey) racism in the depiction of the Chinese exchange student, “the offensively-named Long Duk Dong, a walking stereotype who's treated terribly.”

  A gong sounds every time his name is said. Additionally, Mike muses that they will have to "burn the sheets and mattresses after he leaves." Later, Mike complains that he has to "sleep under some Chinaman named after a duck's dork. 

  "Turning Japanese" even plays on the radio when Long Duk Dong drops Sam off after the dance, even though he's Chinese (though, the actor is Japanese-American). After the party, he drunkenly leaps from a tree and yells, "bonsai!"

  When the family finds him passed out on the grass, he comes to saying "no more yanky my wankie, the donger need food!" and laughs. When they realize he's crashed the car, the grandmother kicks him hard in the stomach. He's mocked to the bitter end.

• It actually gets worse, including the casual discussion of “violating” an unconscious girl. ["I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to," to which Ted earnestly responds, "What are you waiting for?"}

• ” Toward the end of the scene, Jake trades Caroline to Ted for a pair of Sam's underwear, with the implicit understanding that Ted could go ahead and rape her if he wanted to. Clearly Jake doesn't care about Caroline, or consent for that matter.”

There’s more, but my point is: if you are thinking of watching this one with your kids as a heart-warming walk back to the innocence of your youth, don’t.

Howard Fineman. Mensch.

Huge loss.

Howard Fineman, Veteran Political Journalist and TV Pundit, Dies at 75 - The New York Times

**

Nota bene