Several Shakespeare-conscious, pest-minded lines in Maureen Dowd’s “To Jail or Not to Jail” column in The Times constituted perhaps the most-nominated passage of writing in this newsletter feature’s history: “We can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.” (Thanks to Phyllis Wolf of Albuquerque, N.M., and Avon Crawford of Norwalk, Iowa, among many, many others, for shining a spotlight on that.)
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Andrew Coyne assessed the current Trumpian crossroads: “So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice — as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly.” Coyne also commented on how Trump, in the wake of his federal indictment, is trying “to bring the whole U.S. justice system down around him.” “This is not the reaction of a normal person,” he continued. “It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain.” (Stella Deacon, Toronto, and Julie Fleming, Toronto)
In The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland wrote: “The three tenors of showman populism, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi, reached the top through a combination of telegenic clownishness, ‘I alone can fix it’ braggadocio and a shared strain of narcissistic nationalism — and now one faces the judgment of the courts, another has fled the judgment of his peers, while the third contemplates the judgment of the heavens.” (Harriette Royer, Rochester, N.Y.)
Let’s pivot from Trump and Trump analogues to Trump sycophants. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols described how J.D. Vance, who once spoke with such disparaging and devastating accuracy about Trump, did a self-serving about-face in his 2022 Senate race in Ohio and, reprogrammed by that victory, never looked back: “What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, ‘we are what we pretend to be.’” (Debbie Landis, Garrison, N.Y.)