I admire a great deal about Biden, but let’s be honest: He was elected president primarily because he held himself up as the antithesis of, and antidote for, Trump. Trump used to do.”And nothing about Biden is ever supposed to remind anyone of Donald Trump.That was the promise. He said that Biden’s decision to negotiate a secret submarine deal with Australia that nullified a lucrative French arrangement reminded him “a lot of what Mr.
But it didn’t make him the unTrump, either. That didn’t make him Trump. Never was the devil to be discernible in anything he did.But he pulled out of Afghanistan without the degree of consultation, coordination and competence that allies expected, at least of any American president not named Trump.Moreover, his actions — or rather, inaction — regarding the Afghans left behind lacked the empathy that supposedly overflowed in him. While many fresh occupants of the Oval Office are supposed to light a few scented candles and rid the Resolute Desk of the prior occupant’s stench, Biden was supposed to perform an exorcism. And that cast its own unique shadow over — and created a special set of burdens for — Biden’s presidency.
His previous proclamation that “America is back” was understood to be code for “Trump is gone.” Now he had to prove that the exorcism had taken.But here’s the thing about Trump’s possession of America: It was made possible by untended sentiments among many voters that haven’t evaporated, on predispositions that endure. It was how wholly unTrumpy a figure he’d cut. Biden isn’t drawing an emphatic enough contrast with Trump.As Sean Sullivan and Nick Miroff wrote in The Washington Post this week, White House officials have been struggling “to explain searing images of border agents treating Haitian migrants harshly” and now confront intensifying fury from immigrant-rights advocates who “have increasingly concluded that Biden has failed to live up to his campaign vows to defend vulnerable foreigners seeking a better life in the United States.” The kind of border bedlam attributed to Trump’s incompetence and insensitivity has returned and once again dominates the news.By the time Biden stepped to the podium at the United Nations on Tuesday to deliver his first speech to the General Assembly as president, the question wasn’t how well he’d do in terms of his own past, present and potential. The intensity of some Democrats’ anger about it goes beyond the substance of what’s happening to the symbolism of it. Trump’s ‘America First’ approach, though wrapped in far more inclusive language.”And Biden’s return of hundreds of desperate Haitian migrants to Haiti — even though many no longer have any ties there, because they fled Haiti for South America years ago — also seems Trumpy to many observers.
And it doesn’t mean that he won’t find himself in similar places, because he’s navigating some of the same dynamics.“It was the longest day of the year, and the Irish Sea had a metallic tint. But that doesn’t mean that he’s untouched by Trump. Perhaps that’s because Biden tends to throw water on fires, whereas Trump preferred gasoline.All in all, Biden is a far cry from Trump. They no doubt divine ample electoral rationale for some America First maneuvering without the accompanying America First chest thumping.And French tempers may already be cooling, if an apparently calm conversation between Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France on Wednesday is any indication. They know the peril of positioning America as the world’s savior, which can look to some voters like a surrender of national interest — and a sacrifice of American service members — to some highfalutin ideal.They have surely calculated that French outrage isn’t a serious political liability, not if that emotion arises from the United States having claimed its own payday.
His homoeroticism had many mansions, and he roamed their corridors in his dreams with impunity.” (Nancy Trout, West Hartford, Conn.)Here’s Jason Gay, in The Wall Street Journal, on the Russian tennis champion Daniil Medvedev: “A 6-foot-6 collection of arms, legs and wondrously unorthodox strokes, Medvedev swinging away on the baseline can look like someone at a picnic batting away flies.” (Jane Jones, Winchester, Mass.)In The Boston Globe, Scot Lehigh checked in on the efforts of Mike Lindell, the My Pillow founder and Donald Trump comforter, to sell Trump’s corrupt-election lie and noted that Lindell “made himself a laughingstock by hosting a three-day symposium that even his own experts conceded established exactly nothing. To say Mann was closeted is an understatement. (Thanks to Irma Wolfson of Irvine, Calif., for nominating it.)Toibin’s new novel, “The Magician,” about the writer Thomas Mann, was reviewed recently in The Times by Jay Parini, who had this to say about the book’s protagonist: “What he dreamed about, mostly, was handsome young men. Max’s recent profile of the writer Colm Toibin in The New Yorker.
Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” does that. Sarah Lyall, reviewing it in The Times, rightly called it “thoroughly absorbing — not only because of its tantalizing plot and deft pacing, but also because of its unexpected poignancy.” Don’t familiarize yourself with it any further let yourself be surprised.And when a song is an outsize classic, it can, on a given day, come at you more than once, even though its moment is decades past. Not “The Last Flight,” by Julie Clark, which was published last year but which I just read in two big gulps last weekend.
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