In my mind I keep going back to that promised cage match. To the body slams and headlocks that never were. But what stays with me isn’t the overwrought antipathy between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the tetchy tech titans who, in the summer of 2023, made noises — let’s call them grunts — about demonstrating their reciprocal disdain by squaring off and throwing down on the kind of stage used for Ultimate Fighting Championship events.
It’s that two men who reached the zenith of riches and renown by dint of their indisputably superior minds were so vainly focused on their debatably remarkable muscles. The plutocrats yearned to be pugilists. The brainiacs itched to brawl. Not so keenly that they followed through with it; they huffed and puffed without ever coming to blows. But blows weren’t the point. Giving off a whiff of savagery and an impression of mighty brawn was.
When did brains fall so far out of fashion?
Oh, I know that by peacocking about their physical potency, Musk and Zuckerberg were largely addressing their insecurities — their genius had been well established and needed no such amplification. Even so, something about their posturing bespoke a bit of a cultural shift. It brought to mind the way Jeff Bezos, once so reedy and wan, had buffed up, glowed up and begun strutting around in shirts and vests that showcased his biceps. It suited the blunt language and brute ethos of the expanding manosphere, at least as I understand it. (I’m more a denizen of what might be called the wine-o-sphere, with occasional sojourns in the gin-o-sphere.)
Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are hardly you and me. But maybe they reflect something bigger than their moneyed selves: that when men evolve or ascend to a certain level of affluence and know-how, what they want is to throw their weight around, sometimes literally. To flex, fume and fight. That’s as valid an explanation of President Trump as any other. Not a bad explanation of many of his supporters, either.
Trump himself actually goes back and forth between boasting about his smarts (a “very stable genius,” he famously called himself) and his handsomeness (“you have never seen a body so beautiful,” he crowed last September). But his arc bends toward the cosmetic.
When he assembled his first administration eight years ago, he claimed that his cabinet had the highest I.Q. of any cabinet ever. As he assembles his current administration, appearances are claiming whatever foreground intellect supposedly held. It takes little web searching to find images of a shirtless Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services. It takes even less to find images of a shirtless Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed last week as Trump’s defense secretary.
At the Senate hearing that preceded Hegseth’s confirmation, he couldn’t answer a question from Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, about the number and names of the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. But he could — and very proudly did — answer a question from Senator Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican, about the number of push-ups in his fitness routine.
“I did five sets of 47 this morning,” Hegseth said.
That settled it. Put this Adonis in charge of America’s arsenal.
Attention to looks is a bipartisan preoccupation. I remember John Edwards’s $400 haircuts (and that was back in the mid-2000s, before recent inflation). But the denigration of knowledge, contempt for erudition, rejection of expertise and celebration of gut instinct is more a Republican thing and very much a MAGA thing.
And while it overlaps with the fresh fixation on retro masculinity — with Josh Hawley’s “Manhood,” with cave man diets, with the fetishization of firepower — it travels beyond that, to a belief that extensive thinking equals overthinking; that reasoning with opponents is no nobler (and more time-consuming) than bullying them; and that sweeping, simplistic solutions beat targeted, considered ones. Trump’s recent confrontation with the president of Colombia, his brief freezing of trillions of dollars of federal grants and his purges of inspectors general and Justice Department lawyers all align with that perspective. They’re of a crude piece.
Let fussier types make fine-grained distinctions. Trump and his flatterers would rather preen and provoke, and so Musk fashions an online and onstage persona for himself that’s less valedictorian than class clown. Zuckerberg gives himself a makeover that shouts dude instead of wonk. He genuflects before Joe Rogan and shares his epiphanies about “masculine energy” and his love of jujitsu, the martial art he is trying to master.
He is moving out of his brain, into his body! Of course it’s his brain that built the pedestal from which he gets to go on about that.
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For the Love of Sentences
Reflecting on the inauguration, Matt Berg wrote in Crooked Media’s “What a Day” newsletter that Trump’s second term in the presidency began “with a small group of outrageously rich people huddled together indoors to escape the cold as if visiting a cursed hot cocoa bar at the world’s most abominable ski resort.” (Thanks to Karen Martin of Davidson, N.C., for spotting this.)
In The Washington Post, Ron Charles took in Trump’s chillier experience at the Washington National Cathedral during remarks by Bishop Mariann E. Budde: “Trump was seated in the front row of the congregation, but he was still too far away from Budde to grab her by the pulpit.” (Polly Peterson, Hansville, Wash., and Eileen Bell, Victoria, B.C.)
Also in The Post, Robin Givhan made a crucial distinction: “Patriotism is like the love that a parent has for a child; nationalism is akin to believing that one’s child can do no wrong.” (David Ballard, Reston, Va.)
In The Contrarian, David Litt questioned characterizations of the Trump presidency’s furious first days: “One CBS article about his immigration crackdown said Trump ‘invoked muscular presidential powers,’ which is a bit like saying Jeffrey Dahmer ‘displayed omnivorous taste.’” (Tim Keenan, Denver, and Mike Clark, Morelia, Mexico)
In The New Yorker, Sam Knight contemplated Britain’s diminished place in the world: “Old empires are like old stars in the sky. You can’t tell whether the light actually burned out years ago.” (Margaret Wayne, Evanston, Ill., and Douglas R. Melin, Findlay, Ohio)
Also in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik chronicled the effects of insomnia: “Sleep-deprived mice — it seems cruel to keep even mice awake, but we do, possibly by showing them election night on MSNBC over and over — will have a two-hundred-per-cent increase in tumor growth.” (Gale Litt, Corte Madera, Calif., and Jeffrey P. Smith, Chicago)
In The Atlantic, Graeme Wood revisited Hunter Biden’s laptop and many officials’ initial insistence that it was some foreign scheme: “The contents were so sleazy that even if the laptop were a Russian hoax, which it was not, the hard drives should have been power-washed, submerged in isopropyl alcohol and thrown into an active volcano purely as a sanitary measure.” (Gary Seeman, Ridgefield, Wash.)
On her blog, Nancy Nall Derringer explained why an ill-fated Idaho petition drive to roll back same-sex marriage is nonetheless significant: “I’m thinking this is the velociraptors testing the electric fence.” (Vince Patton, Portland, Ore.)
In The Rutland Herald, of Vermont, an unsigned editorial summarized our new president’s fusillade of executive orders: “Donald Trump just decided to slam the nation up against the locker and demand that we all play his game — or else. That’s not leadership. That’s a shakedown.” (Rebecca Bartlett, Brattleboro, Vt.)
In The Times, Jamelle Bouie homed in on Trump’s attempted pause of trillions of dollars of federal grants, loans and other assistance to programs that might not reflect MAGA values “while the president’s apparatchiks chased down the specters of their fevered imaginations, confident that they’d find the source of their cultural alienation in the disbursement of funds to a veterans’ suicide hotline or free lunch for low-income schoolchildren.” (Liz Brown, Oakland, Calif., and Loretta K. Notareschi, Wheat Ridge, Colo.)
Also in The Times, David Brooks defined certain stretches of the 19th century in America as the “golden age of braggadocio,” noting, “There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.” (Matt Cass, Denver)
Maureen Dowd marveled at how much like teenagers the preening, feuding tech gods she encountered in Silicon Valley could be: “They were the richest, most potent men in the world, with a visceral high school vibe. They were the bitchiest, weirdest mathletes in history.” (William Harrison, Kelowna, B.C., and Toni Berres-Paul, Portland, Ore., among others)
And Jonathan O’Callaghan interpreted the choreography of the cosmos: “Some 4.5 billion years ago, the dwarf planet Pluto was suddenly joined by a companion. For a very brief period — perhaps only hours — they danced as if arm in arm before gently separating, a grand do-si-do that resulted in Pluto and its quintet of moons orbiting the sun together today.” (Kent Rhodes, Charlotte, N.C.)
In Hudson Valley One, Rokosz Most remembered when we all traipsed merrily through labyrinths of clothing retailers: “But then, like an enormous dirigible, internet shopping hove into view, interposing itself between the rays of the mercantile sun and the brick-and-mortar operations on the ground. Unacclimated to living in the shadow it cast, the malls below began to shiver in the darkness and die.” (Joanne Catz Hartman, New Paltz, N.Y.)
And in Southern Living, Rick Bragg profiled Dolly Parton and described her arrival for a photo shoot that included a blue-and-white 1970s Ford pickup: “Lord, I think, she’s even prettier than the truck.” (Danny McKenzie, Hattiesburg, Miss.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
Retire These Words!
I have big issues — many of them — with Trump’s pledge to Make America Great Again, including its willful gloss over the parts of our past that should never return. But I come to you today with a smaller complaint about that infernal mantra. A linguistic one.
I’m weary of the wordplay it has inspired.
“Wordplay” is too generous. So, for that matter, is “inspired.” But you can’t go a week or sometimes even a day without reading or hearing about something other than America that someone wants to make great again or something other than great that someone wants to make America again. “Make” and “Again” are like slices of Wonder bread between which an infinity of cold cuts can be wedged. And I’m stuffed.
If (God help us) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes the next secretary of health and human services, he will supposedly “Make America Healthy Again.” I’m not sure which bygone era he and his allies have in mind. The 1980s, when the Reagan administration proposed that ketchup in school lunches be considered a vegetable and ignored the AIDS epidemic? The 1970s, when you could still smoke in restaurants, on flights (some airlines dispensed complimentary cigarettes) and even in hospitals? I was born in 1964, and if there was some hale period of peak health between then and now, I missed it. Maybe I was too busy ingesting trans fats to notice.
But back to my real beef: I have espied proposals not only to “make America affordable again” and “make America safe again” but also to “make America strategic again,” “make America glow again,” “make America normal again,” “make America happy again,” “make America fun again” and “make America America again.” It’s nationally narcissistic, indiscriminately nostalgic and semantically incontinent. It has to stop.
So does the onslaught of the fill-in-the-blank nouns that are eligible, like America, to be made great again. “Make food great again,” “make birds great again,” “make sales great again” — I’ve been pelted with these and more. My favorite, in terms of sheer incoherence? “Make Trump great again.”
That presumes a glory that never was.
“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. It appears every few months. Its previous installment, about double negatives, was in this newsletter.
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