Ben Wiseman
Insult everyone. Answer for nothing.
By Frank Bruni
I imagine Pam Bondi getting ready for one of her appearances on Capitol Hill by practicing in front of a mirror. She hones her glare. She perfects her sneer. She rehearses her lines, such as they are.
“Washed-up, loser lawyer!” That’s for Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. What the phrase lacks in poetry it makes up for in pithiness. It’s just four short words, two of them conveniently conjoined with a hyphen. Even Bondi can remember that much.
“Failed politician!” That’s for Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky. Two words. Insults are all about efficiency.
But it’s not Bondi’s script that matters most. It’s her voice, and the attorney general got the tone of it — the poison in it — just right when she spat those put-downs at those men during her, um, testimony before a House panel last week. She didn’t merely ooze contempt. She gushed it, so that all she communicated during more than four hours of nasty exchanges was how loathsome she found her interrogators. Which was obviously her goal. Her mission.
I can’t get it out of my mind. But then I never stopped thinking about her identical performance before a Senate panel last October. Both crystallized what is arguably the defining trait of the second Trump administration, a bearing and a bullying that cast a noxious haze over all public discourse, which was already plenty polluted. This crew — Bondi, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, President Trump himself — don’t want to win opponents’ favor. They don’t even want to win the argument. Why sweat the delicate art of persuasion when you can use the brute force of condemnation? Comity and conciliation are a slog. They’re for suckers. Contempt is victors’ ready, heady prerogative.
It’s also what the MAGA movement was supposed to be rebelling against. Many people who flocked to Trump in all his spite and willful destructiveness were protesting the condescension and derision of the Democratic elite, who, they felt, held them in contempt. They were responding to Barack Obama’s lament about embittered Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” They were reacting to Hillary Clinton’s gibe about the “basket of deplorables.”
At least that’s one origin theory, one narrative thread.
But Trump, his aides and many of his supporters haven’t purged contempt from our politics. They’ve mainstreamed it. Purified it. Industrialized it. It’s their push-a-button pushback against everyone who challenges them and any circumstances that threaten to undermine them, an all-purpose way to pivot from the substance of a situation to an evasive and obfuscating ill will. Envelop everything in indiscriminate animosity and nothing real survives.
That’s what Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Miller, the impresario of ugliness, did when federal agents killed protesters in Minneapolis. Smear first, ask questions later (or, better yet, never).
Contempt is the default setting for Vance’s crude comments, to which George F. Will devoted much of a recent column in The Washington Post. “It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress,” Will wrote of the climate Vance inhabits. “Undaunted, he tries.” Will added: “Performative politics is almost the only politics on offer nowadays. But must it be a coarseness and flippancy competition?”
For Vance, Bondi & Co., yes, it must, because that’s a contest they can win. Vance has only a scintilla of the experience that many previous vice presidents had. But he can best them in contemptuousness. Pete Hegseth’s résumé pales next to those of many defense secretaries before him. But he can radiate a magnitude of disgust with perceived adversaries that they never did.
The brazen bunch of them model a new idea and exercise of strength, which, to them, isn’t something achieved and fortified by learning from your mistakes. It’s something that puts you in a position to tell others that the mistakes are theirs, call them names and lick your chops as you do. It doesn’t empower you to reach out to your opponents or show them mercy. Mercy is what you make them beg for, so you can savor the pleasure of denying it.
And the way you consolidate and perpetuate power is by so thoroughly demonizing those opponents — by blasting so much contempt at them — that your own failures, corruption and cruelty become irrelevant. You needn’t answer for your fatal thuggery in Minneapolis if you can render its casualties sufficiently contemptible. You needn’t answer questions from a “washed-up, loser lawyer” or a “failed politician” at all.
Bondi came into that hearing last week as a joke, a disgrace, the titular head of a Justice Department that had seen its politically motivated prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James dismissed by a federal judge, its requested indictment of six Democratic lawmakers rejected by a federal grand jury, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files exposed as a travesty. What she should have been feeling and projecting was humiliation.
She opted for contempt. It’s the Trumpian way. But is it the American one? Has the country sunk quite this far? I don’t think so. She and her fellow insult mongers aren’t owning the libs; they’re beclowning themselves. And it’s a repellent circus.
